Dante's Divine Comedy And Fallout's Mr. Handy Are VR's Future

"This isn't some fad," Jesse Schell said as he opened up his GDC talk on VR. "This isn't the Kinect or the Super Scope 6." Schell believes that VR is here to stay, and spent 30 minutes in front of a packed house laying out bold predictions for the medium's first decade.

Schell, whose company Schell Games is working on the Oculus Touch-powered I Expect You to Die (profiled in our January 2016 issue), laid out 40 prognostications for where virtual reality and augmented reality will take us over the next ten years.

Breaking his whirlwind chat down into a number of key areas, Schell laid out expectations for consumer acquisition, public fear about VR, filmmaking, social aspects, location-based entertainment, the technology powering the medium, and touch-based interactions. His predictions include how the media will cover virtual reality, and how filmmaking will evolve. 

Schell predicts that at the end of 2017, there will be 8 million gamer headsets sold to end users. His calculations include 10 percent of Sony's likely 40 million PlayStation 4 install base, 10 Rift units for each of the 300,000 developer kits sold, and 1 million Vive headsets.

He distinguishes gamer headsets from hardware like the Gear VR, expecting that video gamers will drive the medium in its early days. "Gamers are going to drive the adoption of VR, because gamers are bored," he says. Schell suggests that games have gotten stale, especially over the past five years. He suggests that mobile headsets will be sold four-times faster than gamer models, with sales doubling each year.

Schell also believes that by 2022, hardware manufacturers will have cracked the portability problem. "Imagine if you strapped a DS to your face, or imagine if the Virtual Boy didn't suck," he says. These will be VR gaming units that aren't based on sliding a cell phone into a housing (like Gear VR).

On the gaming software side, Schell believes that once the first wave of titles (mostly built upon established genres) passes, a new dominant genre will emerge. This will be something designed specifically for virtual reality and not imported from flat-screen gaming.

However, there are two genres that Schell expects to have a strong presence in virtual reality. He believes that a dance game will hit big, thanks to the ability to mimic head and hand movement. He also suggests that there will be a VR MMO with more than 1 million subscribers by 2020, likely aided by the incorporation of eye-tracking so players can better connect with their friends avatars. He expects that subscriptions will make a comeback, as microtransactions and other free-to-play walls break immersion.

As we covered in our January Year of VR issue, filmmaking will develop its own language. In addition to pornography (which Schell believes will be $1 billion industry by 2020), he suggests that documentaries will be a dominant early form of virtual reality filmmaking. Once home virtual reality filmmaking becomes a reality, he expects that we'll place a higher priority on that mechanism of capturing our family memories, because we'll be able to relive important moments.

On the entertainment side, Schell believes that Dante's The Divine Comedy holds the key to storytelling in virtual reality. Dante's exploration of Hell included a guide, Virgil. Having someone walk the viewer through the film would create a connection and deeper sense of presence, Schell believes.

Though there is much to be excited about, Schell warns that it is only a matter of time before the media links a mass shooting to virtual reality. He specifically cites Epic's Bullet Train demo as an example of what the media might use to make the connection. The idea that players will "hold" guns and optimize their experience to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as they can is likely to be fodder for critics.

Schell also expects that we'll see the media talking "VR addiction." Just as we've seen reports about internet addiction, MMO addiction, and even cell phone/social media addiction, there are likely to be people who become too enamored of VR's isolating impact.

One opportunity for virtual reality entrepreneurs is location-based entertainment. He expects that state fairs will have "VR RVs," giving people a way to expect the medium outside the home. He suspects that there will be fixed VR arcade locations that pop up, but urges caution. Schell says that anyone hoping to build a business around VR entertainment would do well to look at bowling alleys and attempt to generate revenue per square foot equal to the long-lived establishments.

Schell concluded by diverting a bit into the absurd. He suggests that plastic props will be popular, as players will want something more tactile. We saw this with the unending flood of cheap Wii remote attachments, music game plastic guitars, and even toys-to-life.

However, Schell concluded (perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek) that we'll have robots aiding our VR immersion. There are already things like this in prototyping, with researchers developing a sword-fighting arm that reacts to impact and then rears up for another attack. While we're unlikely to see a Mr. Handy style personal assistant that can use different props like wall textures and fans (amusingly portrayed in Schell's final slide), the message is clear. He believes VR is here to stay, and a crop of related businesses will spring up around it to further pull us in to the simulated worlds we'll be exploring.

To learn more about Schell's thoughts on VR and his history and future creating educational software (including prototyping an Oregon Trail MMO), click here to watch his interview on The Game Informer Show.