A Watched Pot Never Boils
My 2019 New Year’s tech resolution is to not look at market data for VR and AR.
Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a refreshing break and are ready for 2019 to be an exciting year in XR, with great content, more breakthrough hardware products, and continued solid growth.
As I got my head back into work over the last few days, I started having familiar tingly feelings. Not good feels; anxious ones. Butterflies. An inner monologue that went something like this:
Is this the year VR finally becomes a viable, self-sustaining ecosystem?
Will handheld AR cross the chasm, or eventually be dismissed as a gimmick?
What will be the installed base for yada yada yada
Thankfully, before I went too deep into this rathole, I stopped myself. There’s no way I’m kicking off 2019 like this, I resolved. This year I’m taking a different tack.
Poor Richard famously observed that “a watched pot is slow to boil,” and this seems particularly true of XR right now. VR is in the doldrums, as the hype on the consumer side has all but vanished, and much of the entrepreneurial energy has migrated to handheld AR. In a particularly sobering moment, there was an exchange during Q&A at VC investor panel at the VR Strategy Conference last October that went something like this:
Audience Member: What is the last VR investment you’ve made?
[Awkward pause]
Panelist: Uh, we did a follow in 2017…
A follow. In 2017. Yep, consumer VR is in a bind, and I think it’s safe to say that 2019 is a make or break year. I’ve got my fingers crossed for the launch of Oculus Quest in March. And I’m actually very hopeful.
Also, this isn’t the whole story. VR and AR are seeing solid uptick in the enterprise. The outlook for handheld consumer AR is bright, if you give credence to reports from AR Insider, eMarketer and others. With roughly a billion AR-capable smartphones and growing, good-enough AR features, and a solid push by the big players and tech and social, the picture will only get better.
Given the above, and the reality that nothing that any of us can do by looking at the landscape daily is going to change things, and that my soul can’t withstand another year of market adoption navel-gazing, I’ve decided that I’m not going to go there. It’s time to take a leap of faith. In 2019, let’s just make stuff and assume this is going to happen.
