Commercial Innovation 2022: A Year in Review
Kyle Cassidy
Since the adoption of extended reality (XR) technologies is dependent upon innovations that seep their way into the mass market, this section provides some insights on key commercial developments in 2022. The main source of data for this section is not a systematic review of academic literature but popular literature and press releases instead.
It’s All Meta
It seems that virtual reality (VR) has been stuck on the event horizon of becoming mainstream for half a decade; always visible, always about to, but never quite living up to its hype (see also article by Harley, 2022[1], which discusses this dynamic in more detail). The following section looks at the ways in which commercial interests have strategically contributed to stimulating and, simultaneously stymying innovation in the VR field. Particularly, this section highlights the disproportionate impact of Meta (formerly known as Facebook) on the development of VR.
Mass market hype has been linked mostly to Meta, the largest global hardware provider of VR wearables. Meta has approached VR in a headlong rush, while simultaneously and strategically dragging its feet. With Meta’s multibillion dollar investment in VR more people than ever have heard of the collection of apps and experiences they are calling the metaverse and have started to use virtual reality tools. Yet, at the same time, Meta has stalled technical advancements, and purchased and then stymied competitors.
A lot of this has to do with the decision to step back from content run on a powerful gaming computer and displayed on a headset (PCVR) in exchange for wireless, self-powered headsets with a fraction of the computing power (Standalone Virtual Reality or SVR). This has limited a lot of the popular VR products to a lower resolution, cartoon-like experience. For example, ToastVR’s Richie’s Plank Experience, which asks users to face their fear and walk out on a wooden plank atop a skyscraper, is still one of the most popular VR demos although the software was released in 2016 and hasn’t been updated since.
Meta also has had some difficulties in wrangling VR into its strategic vision. Since it acquired VR frontrunner Oculus in 2014 after their release of a Kickstarter backed CV1 (Consumer Version 1), they have released the Oculus Rift (CV2) in 2016, and then the Oculus Go in 2018 to try to win over Samsung Gear’s mobile VR market. However, Meta’s stand-alone headsets the Go, Quest, Quest 2, and even the new 2022 Quest Pro still lack the processing power or storage space to run powerful, graphically aweing PCVR apps like Google Earth VR, or any number of so-called AAA games. This is despite the Quest Pro’s $1,500 price tag being not significantly more than an entry level Gaming PC plus VR headset.
Business Use
The Quest Pro itself is a sideways upgrade to the Quest 2, with significantly better lenses and a PR campaign aimed at business-use rather than gaming (despite not shipping with any business software). In fact, a February 2023 search of the Oculus store for business delivers only seven apps, which include a multiplayer PokerStars VR app and a BBQ cooking game. Similarly, Meta’s announcement that you can now view three virtual computer screens at once in your VR headset enticed few people to spend their day wearing a Quest Pro rather than on their laptop. While Meta has had some success in bringing computing into VR (as in Horizon Workrooms, where users can see their computer screens and keyboards), it’s still not as user-friendly an experience as simply taking off your headset off to type.
In short, Meta is trying to find a solid business usage for its VR platform but still lacks a killer business app that will transform the way we work, just as the release of VisiCalc on the APPLE changed our view of the personal computer from a gaming platform to an essential business tool and spawned copycats Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel.
Social Use
Meta is making a significant bet on the future of VR being in multi-user, social experiences. Indeed, apart from the money Meta brings to the table 2.85 billion active monthly users who are already interacting with each other on Facebook.
However, due to the processing limitations, Meta’s own interactive VR social platform, Horizon Worlds, is a cartoon world full of legless avatars bopping around like a child’s toybox of Fisher Price people[2]. All while competitor VR Chat has had full-body VR-integrated avatars walking, dancing, and getting married in VR Chat for years. VR Chat was also used to deliver one of the first university lectures in VR at the University of British Columbia in 2014.
In short, due to Meta’s dominating role and rhetoric in the VR market, many of our consumer experiences are directly linked to their strategic vision. Of course, this also impacts the course of XR social sciences research through the hardware and software we use, as well as through the subsequent virtual experiences we do (or do not) have access to studying. Thus, it is unsurprising that a number of studies in 2022 have critically examined Meta’s role in the XR ecosphere. At the time of this writing, we are still waiting to see what Apple is going to enter into the XR market. Thus, for better or worse, Meta has left a meta mark on our current visions of XR.
Machine Learning and NeRF
It is worth adding a note on two other exciting technologies in the mass-market in 2022: machine learning and Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). The more controversial technological advancement of the two was the advent of publicly available Artificial Intelligence (AI), more accurately described as machine learning. OpenAI’s art generator Dall-E, and text-based AI ChatGPT burst into the public consciousness in late 2022 by writing essays, creating illustrations, and causing a panic amongst educators who suddenly had little idea how to handle learners who were generating their assignments via AI. ChatGPT was released in November of 2022 and within about a month it was listed as co-author of several academic papers (see for example: ChatGPT & Zhavoronkov, 2022; O’Connor & ChatGPT, 2023). In turn, major journals Science and Nature quickly updated their editorial policies to forbid AI’s Large Language Models from being listed as authors, citing a lack of accountability.
The inevitable integration of AI into VR will have profound effects like more realistic and unscripted interactions with non-human avatars. Furthermore, AI paired with VR has the potential to create VR experiences with less development costs, provided the processing power exists to run them.
Another recent breakthrough with incredible potential is the development of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), which uses a combination of video or photographs and AI to capture radiance (light) from every possible point in an area to create a virtual photorealistic scene for a phone, computer, or head mounted display. There are vast implications for this development since a few well-placed cameras could allow a scene to be rendered, streamed in relatively low resolution, and then interpolated by the end user, allowing for fully navigable VR experiences of live events, as well as the easy mapping of spaces. Google has mapped most of America with low-flying airplanes whose side-scanned views are able to interpolate 3D buildings and objects from video. The potential for NeRF technologies to become significantly more robust and accessible to the mass consumer may be very close. It’s easy to look ahead to being able to move about in a concert venue or tour a real-time view of a tourist attraction in excruciating detail.
In short, both machine learning and NeRF provide some fascinating opportunities for researchers and one can imagine, simultaneously pose equally interesting questions about the nature of knowledge and research ethics.
Harley, D. (2022). “This would be sweet in VR”: On the discursive newness of virtual reality. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221084655 ↑
Late in 2022 Meta revealed that Horizon worlds avatars will now have a full body, but they will still resemble cartoon-like figures more than fully human ones. There is some interesting debate around the reasoning for this, as research on the ‘uncanny valley’ of technology has shown that people tend to respond uncomfortably to avatars who look too human, if they can still detect that they are not real. ↑