The Verge 2018 tech report card: AR and VR
2018 was partly a year of disillusionment. Some prominent AR and VR companies, including Meta, Jaunt, and Starbreeze, either massively downsized or shifted their focus. As the head of CCP Games put it in October, a year after leaving the VR business, “we expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was.”
Especially since this is the first year I’ve covered augmented reality, I’m also deducting points for the industry’s increasingly convoluted terminology. Is a given product augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, a heads-up display, smart glasses, an immersive computing device, or possibly something else? Here. Have a chart.
Hearteningly, though, one of VR’s early long shots may have actually paid off. In 2016, location-based VR entertainment startup The Void seemed like an ambitious but risky project. After getting investment from Disney and launching a Star Wars-themed experience last year, though, it’s opened several new locations and is working with more Disney-owned franchises. It’s just one of many VR arcades and theme parks — although those aren’t all doing great either, since IMAX shut down its VR location-based entertainment experiment in 2018.
So against the longer arc of history, I’m not sure how the past year will look. But hey — at least we got Beat Saber out of it.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18159462/2018-tech-recap-vr-ar-virtual-augmented-reality-beat-saber-oculus-hololens-magic-leap