July 30th, 2023

Welcome to The Future of VR newsletter. Thanks for subscribing to our list - we’re grateful to have you here. Let’s dive in to some of the biggest updates we’re seeing in the world of Virtual Reality this week:

Calgary Fire Department Uses VR:

The Calgary fire department just launched a VR program to help firefighters simulate a live fire. We’ve never had to climb out of a burning building (yet) but in the rare case that this happens to us in the future, we’d prefer that the firefighter has some legitimate experience.

The VR space as a whole has had a really heavy emphasis on gaming over the last few years but we think situations like this represent one of the biggest use cases for virtual reality that will begin to play a much bigger role over the coming years.

There are a lot of things in life which simply can’t be practiced. Military special ops drills, malfunctioning airplanes, cops in a life or death situation, actors doing Tom Cruise style stunt scenes…there’s endless applications for VR in situations like these.

Meta’s Reality Labs Loses $21B

Since the beginning of 2022, Meta has been DEEP in the red due to their VR department. They’ve lost over $21B including $7.7B over the last 6 months. On paper, things are looking pretty rough right now.

Q2 sales were $276M, which are down from $339M in Q1. We’re confident things will turn around for them though. Zuckerberg announced details about the Quest 3 headset in June. This is going to be released at a $500 pricepoint which substantially undercuts Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro.

Here’s something that most people don’t realize either. Zuckerberg has been in the VR game since 2015. He’s no beginner to this industry and it’s not like he’s just going to drop Reality Labs after a bad 18 month period. Zuckerberg has gone on record saying that AI is their primary focus at the moment (since this drives ad revenue for Meta) but VR is their ultimate long term goal.

According to a leaked internal memo, one of Zuckerberg’s biggest regrets is that he never created physical products that his social media platforms could be accessed through. Apple built the Mac and the iPhone which Meta ultimately depends on for a large segment of their user base to access Meta and Instagram. Zuckerberg intends to change this through VR as we’re already beginning to see with its Quest Headsets.

Metaverse 2.0

The world was first introduced to the Metaverse through the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash in the 90s. More recently, the book/film Ready Player One has created more hype surrounding it. Yet the initial launch of the Metaverse has disappointed a lot of people.

The poor graphics and non life-like features are a far cry from what people expected after seeing the NYC chase scene in the beginning of Ready Player One. We think it’s important to keep tabs on the Metaverse though since it’s clearly one of long term goals of the VR space.

Metaverse 2.0 platforms are working to fix these issues. One of these platforms, Megavrse, recently launched a hyperrealistic virtual environment that can support up to 10,000 users. They are current selling land parcels through the Binance NFT platform.

That’s a wrap for this week. Watch out for our next newsletter coming next Sunday!