Meta has spent more than $45 billion on its Metaverse initiatives. Some estimates suggest that Apple has spent nearly half that much on creating the Vision Pro headset, and the 5000 or so patents around it. Initial adoption rates have been underwhelming. Vision Pro may sell around 400,000 headsets this year. That would imply unit sales well under 1% of the 232 million iPhones it sold last year. Meta is said to have sold more than 20 million headsets since it launched the Quest 2 in 2020. This cumulative total reaches less than 1% of the 3 billion+ users of its various app platforms. To be sure, each is a $1 billion+ business in annual revenue. But still highly unprofitable and far from realizing the assumed potential of the Metaverse/spatial computing that supported each company’s investment thesis.
Will spatial computing ever become mainstream? It is way too early to suggest that virtual presence with one’s colleagues and family, interactive 3D training modules, and augmented reality applications that fill in key data about the world we experience are not inherently desirable uses of spatial computing that could appeal to a broad audience. Some estimates suggest that 10 billion PowerPoint presentations are given each year. Does anyone think that is the most effective way to share information, let alone learn new skills? Smartphone mapping programs are incredibly useful, but who has not struggled trying to orient a 2D map into a 3D world?
Spatial computing has incredible potential but is limited by two key factors. One is hardware. For all the elegance of the Vision Pro headset technology and the remarkable technical performance of the Meta Quest at 15% of the Vision Pro’s price—neither is very comfortable to wear. Both make one look ridiculous. And despite their ability to pass through a view into the real world, you still risk tripping over something if you wear them while walking. Some compare the current headsets to the brick-like cell phones from the 1980’s. No doubt they will improve. Meta may have a winner with its smart Ray-Ban sunglasses. Stylish, comfortable, and eliminates the need for ear pods. Only audio augmented reality for now, but hopefully one day perhaps visual augmented reality as well.
The second limiting factor is content. The number of smartphone apps is approaching 10 million. AR and VR content has a long way to go to catch up. The Meta Horizon Store has fewer than 700 apps, mostly games. It recently incorporated its “app lab” content into the Horizon Store, adding 2000+ additional developmental applications. Less than a third of headsets are used daily and Meta is struggling to get average usage above 15 minutes per day. The Vision Pro is an amazing and expensive piece of engineering. But Apple is still searching for the killer app for “spatial computing.” It claims 2000+ Vision Pro applications plus compatibility with 1.5 million+ iPhone/iPad apps. A lot of these apps are 2D content that can be consumed on a VR headset—movies, photos, and Microsoft Word, among others. It is great to have a virtual big screen for a movie while sitting in an airline seat, but that misses the point of the potential of presence and a visceral experience that comes from 3D content that takes advantage of the headsets’ full capabilities.
Creating extended reality content is still difficult and expensive. Unreal and Unity allow developers to create amazing content, especially games, but they are not simple to learn and not aimed at the casual business user or consumer. Other authoring platforms often do little more than allow 2D annotations to be added to AR scenes or 3D videos. Games are a big market, so headsets can certainly gain share from the game console market. But the big opportunity is user generated content.
Games, productivity, entertainment, and shopping apps (typically created by design studios with dev teams) are around 30% of screen time on smartphones. Social media, pictures, video, etc. (typically from individual creators) are most of the screen time. The corporate training market is estimated at $300 billion—much of it internally generated PowerPoints. Reducing the cost and democratizing the access to creating 3D content will be a key contributor to accelerating spatial computing adoption.
Umajin is a spatial computing authoring platform purpose-built to reduce the cost and time required to publish Metaverse content, and enable a much broader group of creators to find discover new use cases for 3D. It is built around a proprietary 3D engine and provides drag and drop visual authoring of true interactive 3D VR and AR workflows. It can import an AI generated scene, or create photorealistic digital twin using a series of photographs of a location taken by a smartphone or XR headset. Using this scene, the XR Editor makes it easy to create scenarios using drag and drop 3D assets, Nvidia Omniverse elements, clip art, and action triggers. Our goal directed architecture has enabled us to quickly integrate AI prompts into the authoring process. The system supports multiple VR users interacting with each other in scenarios. Native support for Horizon OS allows Umajin apps to run directly on Quest headsets. Open XR support allows users to stream from a laptop powered by a DirectX Nvidia GPU to a connected XR headset, such as Meta Quest 3 or Vive Elite Pro for use cases such as multi-user interactive VR scenario training.
By moving extended reality authoring from the studio to the user, the Umajin opens the opportunity for creative innovation. The value of interactive VR training and AR workflow applications for frontline workers is well established. By reducing the cost and cycle time of creating customized content, the adoption of these extended reality tools will be accelerated. Nvidia has been investing to create an extensive library of 3D assets and AI tools that can be used in extended reality applications, and has been positioning the Omniverse USD format as a standard that facilitates the sharing and re-use of existing 3D content. Umajin enables these to be easily stitched together into workflows that can run natively on XR headsets.
But there are clearly other exciting use cases waiting to be developed, both in enterprise and consumer applications of extended reality. Meta and Apple are already competing to improve XR headset performance and comfort, and presumably bring the cost down to a point that supports broad adoption. But people need a reason to buy them, and more importantly, to use them frequently. A key enabler of finding the killer apps that catalyze broad adoption will be content authoring tools that lower the cost and shorten the timeline of development, and that vastly increase the pool individuals who can author high quality XR applications.