Virtual Reality and the Chase

2016 has been the year of virtual reality, and as the holiday season approaches and we begin to look back and reflect on the year, it's a good time to evaluate the promise of VR and whether we've anywhere near approached it.

The year saw the release of three major headsets in the VR market: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the brand new PlayStation VR.

While the first two are headsets specifically made for beefy, gamer-ready desktop PCs, the PlayStation VR is a headset made exclusively to connect to Sony's PlayStation 4. This means it specifically is skewed towards gamers and games, and less towards the social experiments, video watching experiences and early access playgrounds of the more expensive headsets.

This is a double-edged sword, as while games are great, focusing towards them exclusively keeps you limited in scope. Every game developer seems to be making a VR demo for the PS VR, but not too many are actually making full game experiences. Many people seem excited to play a Final Fantasy XV demo on the PlayStation, but how many are going to play a brand new, original title made for such a headset?

While the PS VR specializes, the Rift and the Vive are, even months after their release, blank slates. Tiltbrush VR allows creative and non-creative users alike to paint the skies around them with color and grace. Rec Room allows VR owners to come together and play games in a social environment like darts and ping pong. Adrift is a beautiful, incredible space adventure about the fearfulness of actually floating along in zero gravity amidst a station that is collapsing quickly.

At the end of the day, all these headsets are chasing something. They're looking for new kinds of experiences that people haven't had yet, that will make people crave more. The sort of blockbuster hit like Super Mario Bros. or Microsoft Word that opens eyes to the prospect of the platform and creates a need that sells more headsets and inspires more of those same experiences.

Whether this will happen remains to be seen. But in the meantime, the chase is fun to follow.