Anyone who has followed the news lately about AltSpaceVR closing (and possibly reopening) and the recent launch of the new space from the originators of Second Life, Sansar, is asking: what does it take to succeed in social VR? What is a sustainable business model that supports a growing and thriving social VR environment?
Expanding Reach
As virtual reality continues to reach more and more users — becoming more accessible and affordable and higher quality every year — a critical mass of consumer attention will become available. But we’re not quite there yet.
While VR is getting more great content all the time, the trick is to keep visitors interested and engaged in the VR experience — to give them reasons to stick around and to come back. The secret ingredient to creating that kind of stickiness, in my opinion, is to have them share it with someone.
Sharing VR is Caring about VR
Exploring together, discovering something new together, is considered by psychologists to be a bonding experience. It is also a perfect antidote to otherwise isolating effects of technology.
MMO (massively multiplayer online) games have shown the power of playing together virtually, engaging gamers and building communities. As VR becomes familiar and common to the remaining huge population of non-gamers, we’ll see growing demand for virtual places to meet, hang out, and have new experiences with distant friends.
“Exploring together, discovering something new together, is considered by psychologists to be a bonding experience. It is also a perfect antidote to otherwise isolating effects of technology.”
Limited Reach
But doing what? Dedicated social VR apps tend to be like any social media platform. You and your friends sign up to chat and share. And you might make new friends among others who’ve also signed up.
These VR apps usually provide other things to do together, like goofing around with toys and mini-games. But as long as these experiences remain inside specific apps (to download and sign up for) these kinds of channels will have limited reach.
AltSpaceVR has struggled not only because it does not have strong monetization but also because it was unable to grow its user base. Second Life seems to have found its limit on user growth as well, and it doesn’t seem likely Sansar will expand much on that.
How can such applications become the kind of essential destination that Facebook has become, with billions of users?
What’s Missing?
Let’s try coming at this problem from a different direction.
Let’s imagine that VR is everywhere: you can’t even make it through the morning without stumbling on at least a few opportunities to go immersive.
Imagine that any company, organization, or individual can easily and simply host a virtual space of their own making, with almost zero bar to entry. Media companies can create content portals; merchandisers can host branded experiences and ecommerce; and people can create forums to gather, share, experience, and explore together.
Then let’s imagine that for all of these myriad virtual places, a simple web or text link or QR code is all it takes to launch it on any mobile device.
Finally let’s imagine that your social network and your location are automatically factored into this virtual space, making meeting up with friends and family in VR natural and almost effortless.
Ubiquitous access, unlimited content, and near-zero social friction. Enabling this entails:
1. easily built custom and branded 3D worlds, built using simple web-tools.
2. high-efficiency streaming content that doesn’t require content installation on your phone.
3. SDKs for embedding in branded apps
4. a white-label VR engine that is core to your phone’s operating system.
By the way, this is essentially what the Envrmnt platform is all about.
Monetization
Given this vision, what would be the financial benefit for a company hosting their own VR experience? Beyond simply product branding and advertising, with their ambiguous ROIs, they could offer an a la carte menu of options for generating income, including:
- ecommerce/sales
- selling ad space
- subscription models
- a variety of micropayment and upsell opportunities.
Such a platform should support a wide range of customizations and prefabs — bundles of complex assets that include models with animations, behaviors, interactions, and more — that can be easily imported into the engine. These sharable bundles could have many uses, including handling monetization transactions within VR.
But the real gains will become apparent once VR achieves significant penetration in the consumer market. It will be the place to be — to meet, to share, to experience… and to spend money, too.
