100m People in VR is not the Goal

One hundred million people in VR at the same time isn’t a goal — it is the starting point.

The real goal is obtaining the inherent user lock-in related to hosting the most accurate simulation of materials, humans, goods and environments available. As we approach perfecting simulation of aspects of the real world, things that we used to do in the real world will now make sense to do in a VR context instead.

This upward trend will intersect another: real raw materials are increasingly strained, forcing the cost of production for goods beyond the access of the middle class. For activities that can be well simulated in VR but require hard to access materials to do in the real world, VR becomes a reasonable substitute.

Early VR 2.0 pioneers have talked about the opportunity to create a game that caused a mini-revolution like Doom did. That’s small potatoes. We are talking about a platform with control of artificial scarcity with the ability to make copies of goods for fractions of a penny. The winners in this game are the controllers of this exclusive simulation.

In this environment, Ferrari’s most valuable assets are going to be its trademarks many times over anything else it holds.

Dominoes will fall. VR headsets are the leaping off point, but not the whole picture — haptic controls, motion sensors, binaural audio interfaces, the list goes on. As each improves, more activities will make sense to perform in a virtual environment.

Looking back twenty years, referring to VR as a headset is going to seem trite. The world is changing from a place that “has Internet” to a place that is the Internet, and for the first time, you only have to extrapolate the fidelity of current simulation technologies to see it.