Comment on AR will be startup dominated, VR will not by Nels Long

I would like to thank you for your recent article “AR will be startup-dominated, VR will not”.

As CEO of a VR startup currently seeking VC investment a number of your observations really hit home. I believe as long as your original premise, “VR’s value chain will be dominated by content creation”, stays correct, you’re probably right. But what if that isn’t the case?

What’s so interesting about the dichotomy of VR and AR is that right from the start, VR was a gaming platform and AR was an enterprise platform. At the same time you see Sony heralding their new generation of VR content, you see videos from the JPL, Case Western, and other leading research institutes showing how they plan on working in AR.

This I believe is the real difference. Content for entertainment and platforms for enterprise are really the differentiating factor with this new generation of hardware. It’s just that off the shelf enterprise software seems much more appropriate in AR than it does in VR. After all, the working world is primarily concerned with non-virtual experience, for now.

My company, Second Studio, is an enterprise VR platform targeted at the design fields, providing students and professionals alike a virtual space and tools to create and collaborate — borrowing many social mechanics from online gaming. Coming from a background in architecture and tracking the VR field since its inception, I couldn’t understand why we were spending so much time behind screens to design three-dimensional space – especially once the first VR development kits began appearing. Since so little design work ever transcends the virtual to become a physical thing, I chose to treat it as such and created a virtual platform to get designers off their screens and back in space.

I challenge your original premise on the grounds that as a society we are becoming ever more digital, ever more virtual, and that all the new content we hope to use in these fancy new headsets will need to be created somewhere. That content will eventually need to be created in a virtual realm itself, using virtual tools. It’s not a question of VR vs. AR rather, a question of consumable vs. usable content.

I would love to hear your response to this. As I stated previously we’re currently seeking VC investment ourselves and given the nature of our company, any advice you have for navigating the VR market would be highly regarded.