Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities

Part IV. Creating Cross-Platform Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

When Facebook bought Oculus Rift in 2014 for $2 billion, the investment industry became catalyzed with virtual reality (VR) validated as ushering in the dawn of a new age of computing. Slowly the market became inundated with Oculus alternatives in the war for the space on your face. Until that point, augmented reality (AR) was practically dominated by Vuforia, an image-based tracking solution. But with the Oculus acquisition, suddenly several companies and products in the immersive space quickly rose to recognition: Meta and Magic Leap for AR, Samsung GearVR and Google Cardboard, and then Hololens and Daydream among many others.

As an investor with Qualcomm Ventures, Steve Lukas was tasked with finding which companies would “win” in the VR/AR space; that’s when a massive problem was identified: a software ecosystem that was limited and fracturing further with each headset release. This wasn’t fully clear until 2016, when all of the platforms began releasing to the public. As is the usual case with a new industry, the most vocal proponents of VR caused an over-expectation of adoption uptake, and VR ended up selling in lower numbers than originally anticipated. This was consistent for every headset release, with each platform looking like it would be the one that would take the market mainstream, whether it was the full power of HTC Vive, the free Samsung GearVRs distributed with their new phones, the low cost ...