1 Billion People In VR Headsets?

When does it happen?

Andrew Eiche is the head of Owlchemy Labs, which is the studio behind Job Simulator and the exploratory hand tracking experience Dimensional Double Shift.

His opinions are his own — he doesn’t speak for his employer — and I asked him some questions about the path to 1 billion people in VR headsets and the decisions being made in trying to get there.

Eiche:

I think the speed of software adoption has broken Silicon Valley. Hardware follows a very predictable curve. The first cellphone was in 1983. The first blackberry is 2002. The first iPhone is 2007. The first billion mobile users was likely Q3 2012. So 30 years from the first viable consumer phone to 1 billion users.

I feel like we see the start of phones as 2007 and wonder why it’s taking longer than 5 years for new hardware adoption.

Meta is a software company first, so I can understand why their internal model for success might trend super positive. I think the software crowd forgets the reason they can super scale software is hardware led the way. You only get a ChatGPT 1 billion users in 2 years because hardware seeded the delivery mechanism. Amazon was founded in 1994 and it took years to get to global scale across all verticals. It feels like some folks are expecting that we can go from a bunch of guys in a garage with duct tape and phone screens to global massive scale in a decade. 2004 Amazon looks nothing like 2024 Amazon does. As the famous saying goes “it’s easier to move bits than atoms”. It would be good to remember that.

I give Meta a lot of credit for trying to accelerate that timeline. They likely have cut 5-10 years out of the growth curve. That’s huge for a private entity! They should be very proud!

Finally, there is a hardware technology that did get adopted by over a billion people in 10ish years. Satellite broadcasts. From Sputnik to Apollo 11 was a little over a decade. The cost: 2.5% of the ENTIRE US GDP. So if we’re ready to invest an average of 777 billion dollars a year I bet we can get XR to a billion people in an incredible form factor with technology we can only dream of.