Last week we opened up applications for Livecamp, our next themed pre-seed program. For each of these Camp programs we pick a specific emerging area that we’re really excited about and want to go deep on, and the focus for Livecamp, which kicks off in September in New York City, will be on startups building live interactive experiences. 

What do we mean exactly by “Live”? While previous Camps have focused on more clearly delineated categories like voice-based computing (Voicecamp), AR and computer vision (Visioncamp), and conversational software and messaging (Botcamp), this will be the first Camp where what we are looking for is tougher to define; for example, it’s pretty easy to decide what does and doesn’t count as an augmented reality product. We picked “Live” as the theme of our next program because we believe something big is happening at the intersection of television and gaming that is reshaping media and culture. The boundary between those two once distinct categories is becoming increasingly blurry as TV becomes more like gaming and gaming becomes more like TV. For Livecamp we want to work with startups that are exploring these boundaries and working to define the future of live by creating new kinds of synchronous multiplayer experiences that borrow from both gaming and television.

After 25 years of false promises, a lot of the crazy stuff around “interactive TV” we’ve been waiting for is finally becoming a reality. Apps like HQ Trivia are proving you can build a massive audience by re-inventing the game show as something everyone can play, not just watch. Streaming platforms like Twitch and Mixer and esports titles like League of Legends and Overwatch have turned gaming into a spectator sport, showing that it can be just as much fun to watch someone play video game as it is to play it yourself. There is an inexorable trend of audiences moving beyond being just passive consumers of content and towards becoming active participants in their own right.

Why now? Some of it is simply cultural: we’ve had entire generations grow up for whom gaming and its dynamics are now second nature and they expect participatory experiences by default. It also helps that we’ve reached a point where a lot of the core infrastructure that’s needed to build these kinds of live interactive experiences is in place and is increasingly cheap and easy to use. That means startups can focus more on crafting amazing experiences and less on trying to keep servers from crashing (though of course that does still happen from time to time). That moment when startups need to differentiate through creativity and not just sheer engineering talent is exactly what we get excited about here at betaworks, because that’s when the real experimentation around product starts to happen. That is why we’re doing Livecamp: We’re convinced something is going on here and we’re looking for fresh approaches to what it means to build live interactive experiences. 

If you’re working on anything in this space we’d love to hear from you and see how we may be able to help. You can learn more about Livecamp here. If you’re ready to apply you can start the application process here. Any questions? You can contact me here.

I had a random idea earlier today: What if I held open office hours via text on Telegram? I’m thinking it could be a low-pressure way for founders to get feedback on their product or idea. Would anyone be interested in trying it out sometime? If so, let me know via the contact form — or ping me on Telegram.

I’m working with a small group planning a half-day summit for May 15th in San Francisco and we’re looking for a freelance event manager/producer to help us out. Our ideal candidate is someone organized and detail-oriented who can assist with the following tasks (among others):

• Interfacing with the event venue

• Scheduling speakers

• Coordinating technical and A/V needs for the event

• Managing the day of the event (badges, check-in process, speakers, catering, etc)

This is a part-time role, we’d expect just two or three hours a week of your time in the weeks leading up to the event and full days the day before and day of the event. This will be an especially fun project to work on if you’re interested in augmented reality!

Send your resume/background and hourly rate to me here and we’ll get back to you!

The day nearly every digital media company has been fearing has finally come: Facebook is going to change the way News Feed works. In a post last week Mark Zuckerberg announced that over the coming months Facebook will begin showing users less “public content from businesses, brands, and media,” and instead prioritize updates and content shared by friends and family. For publishers who have become addicted to the free traffic which has flowed from Facebook users clicking and sharing articles which have populated their News Feeds, this is bad news (especially given that the amount of traffic Facebook sends publishers has already been dropping steadily since last year). For those who have built their entire readership acquisition strategy around social distribution through Facebook, it may well prove fatal.

For media companies, relying on Facebook for traffic was seductive. While the good times rolled, it was easy to overlook that despite being called “News Feed”, anyone getting their news via Facebook is a side effect of the platform, not its intent. News publishers, who often put a considerable amount of effort into optimizing their content and websites to maximize Facebook shares, became accustomed to thinking of that traffic as “theirs.” They mistakenly believed that the distribution of their articles and videos via News Feed was a natural extension of Facebook’s core functionality — or even the point of the platform in the first place. But Facebook’s purpose is not to deliver the news, or even more broadly, “information.” At the end of the day, Facebook doesn’t care whether anyone becomes better informed by using Facebook. What ultimately matters to Facebook is that you continue to use it, which is why News Feed has been a machine designed to show you more and more of whatever it is that you will look at, click on, and share.

Up until this announcement it largely didn’t matter whether that content was your friend’s cat photos, a story about Yemen in the New York Times, or a recipe from AllRecipes. I can’t tell whether Mark Zuckerberg is being disingenuous when he wrote in this past Thursday’s announcement about the changes that he expects, “the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” but that also the time spent “will be more valuable” and that in the long term such changes will be “good for our community and our business.” You can bet that Facebook has already done plenty of A/B testing of these changes. It’s entirely possible that they’ve determined that time spent will actually go up. Or that even if the amount of time the average person spends using Facebook goes down, it won’t negatively impact revenue because engagement with ads improved and/or those brands and publishers which can afford it will pay for distribution they previously enjoyed for free.

Zuckerberg also said in his announcement that what content from businesses, brands, and media users see, “should encourage meaningful interactions between people.” Sounds great, right? What worries me is that this may have the unintended consequence of making the fake news problem even worse. Strong engagement is why deliberately fabricated articles have done so well on Facebook in the first place. If you don’t care much about being accurate — or the damage you might do by misleading people — it’s all too easy to create content which will strike just the right kind of emotional nerve to drive clicks and shares. Today’s polarized climate has made it especially easy for anything which inflames political passions to get shared, regardless of how true it may be. All that clicking and sharing is just the kind of big fat engagement signal the NewsFeed algorithms have looked for when calculating what to show users. Making things worse, these false stories didn’t just have the effect of crowding out legitimate, but less engaging, content from your News Feed — a situation which will likely be exacerbated by these changes. They also had a knock-on effect of diminishing the authority of articles which did surface in your News Feed from more established publications. How? Putting every piece of content, one after the other, in a single undifferentiated, uniformly-designed feed effectively flattens any distinctions between. You can’t put a spurious site like Infowars next to a reputable publication like the New York Times in someone’s News Feed and not expect the authority of the latter to rub off on the former. (This is a problem Google has as well with respect to ranking of search results.)

I don’t know exactly how the new News Feed will handle issues like this. It’s reasonable to assume that once publishers have some sense of what signals around engagement the algorithms are looking for, they will optimize their content for the new algorithms. Misleading content may actually be more likely to surface in users’ feeds than informative content from legitimate sources as a result. It is also worth noting that most publishers won’t be able to afford to pay to promote their content in order to drive click-thru. The cost of doing so will usually exceed their ability to monetize via advertising, potentially giving an advantage to anyone (including a state-sponsored actor with malicious intent) who has the resources to pay to promote misleading content into users’ News Feeds but has no need to generate revenue from that traffic.

The solution to all this could be to have Facebook “do the right thing” and just show us dispassionate, authoritative, high-quality news articles anyway, right? Well, that kind of news may be better for us, but would likely lead to people using Facebook less and that would be bad for business. We don’t necessarily want to admit it, but news, or at least the kind of news that we want people to read so they’ll be better citizens, isn’t necessarily what they want to look at online. There’s nothing stopping anyone from just going directly to places like The Washington Post or Economist or New York Times to get their news (or better yet, subscribing to them). However, most people are casual consumers of news in whatever form is most convenient, whether it’s via whatever they see in their Facebook feed, headlines at the top of the hour on the local FM station, or CNN when they’re flipping channels. When they do actively seek out news by going directly to a source it is often to read or watch about a specific topic or area of interest, like sports, celebrity gossip, or tech (something I tapped into with Gizmodo and Engadget – during my time at each site the majority of traffic came from direct visits).

Even if social platforms like Facebook and Twitter disappeared, would any of that change? Before the rise of social media, most internet users who consumed news online did so via big portals like Yahoo and AOL (which is why getting on those homepages was a key strategy for digital media business at the time). Plus, it’s not like the era immediately preceding the web was exactly a golden era of journalism producing a well-informed citizenry, either. Daily newspaper subscription rates began falling decades before the advent of the web, supplanted mainly by broadcast and then cable news. Yes, we had fewer debates over what was true and what was false, but this was because we had a media ecosystem which was largely closed to bad actors. And over time, consolidation via mergers and acquisitions meant that a relatively small number of gigantic media companies determined most of what we consumed. As damaging as Facebook has been for our political discourse, the sad reality is that most people don’t go out of their way to become better informed by seeking out quality journalism about the state of national and international affairs. News Feed has been good at giving us what we want, not what we need.

For a while everything seemed great. Users who weren’t naturally inclined to seek out news ended up consuming it because it showed up in their feeds. All that free traffic from Facebook masked two problems for publishers. First, a big platform which doesn’t care much whether you live or die essentially controls access to your readers. Second, readers that only visited you because they clicked on a link in their News Feed probably don’t have a strong connection to your brand — or possibly even much awareness of which sites they were reading what articles. Getting them to go out of their way to find you when those links stop showing up is going to be difficult.

Could you address both of those problems by having a group of publishers come together to create a new platform for distributing their articles and videos via a News Feed-like newsreader app, perhaps one including options for monetization via ads, subscriptions, and micropayments? Yes, but simply offering an app for people to read the news and calling it a day won’t be enough, especially if you want to get more people reading high quality, informative journalism and not celeb-driven clickbait. Aggregating a large audience is key, remember that all these websites flocked to share their content on Facebook in the first place because of its potential to deliver massive amounts of free traffic. Anything which doesn’t move the needle in terms of audience (and hence revenue) is not going to be worth the effort. I don’t pretend to have the answer here, but there would have to be something distinctive and compelling about the way news is consumed and shared on a platform like this if there’s going to be any hope of attracting audiences at the scale for which publishers are looking.

That said — and without minimizing the challenges inherent in building sustainable news businesses — I am hopeful that in the long-run breaking publishers’ addiction to Facebook traffic will free them from having to create so much pageview-driven clickbait (something even prestigious publishers engage in), allowing them instead to focus more on audiences who seek out journalism and pursue subscriptions and other non-advertising based sources of revenue. It’s why I’m definitely in favor of more experimentation with how people discover and consume news; publishers have to become less reliant on big platforms like Facebook (and Google, for that matter) for distribution if they are going to survive and. For my part, I’ve opted out of Facebook (I quit almost eight years ago and never looked back), use an RSS reader to get most of my news (which lets me decide what sources of news I read), and am a paid subscriber to publications I value. These may be small steps, but they feel like the least I can do to help foster a healthier ecosystem around news. 

It’s been almost exactly a year since I shared the list of my favorite history podcasts. It was an extensive list, but if you thought having so much to listen to meant that I’d stopped my search for new shows, well, you were sorely mistaken, because I found a bunch more this past year that I loved. Here are my favorite history podcast finds for 2017:

Tides of History

Tides of History started out as The Fall of Rome, a podcast exploring the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but after a name change morphed into something bigger and more ambitious by tackling not just why Rome fell, but also how urban society got back on track in Europe a thousand years during the late medieval and early modern era. Host Patrick Wyman does a masterful job of weaving together strands from history, archaeology, sociology, religion, politics, and even climate change in order to tell a remarkably nuanced and complex story that can tell us a lot about why the world we live in today is the way it is.

Hardcore History Addendum

If you’re a fan of history podcasts you already know Dan Carlin, host of the insanely great Hardcore History. Hardcore History Addendum is a spin-off where Dan plans to fit in episodes that don’t have the ambitious scope of a regular Hardcore History episode, which are now usually several hours long and part of multi-episode series. His first episode was an extended tangent from his series on World War I, and the second was an interview with History of Rome and Revolutions host Mike Duncan, having those two legends on a podcast together was sort of like when Al Pacino and Robert Deniro finally appeared in a movie together.  

Uncivil

I sort of have a conflict here, since betaworks ventures is an investor in Gimlet, the podcast network which produces Uncivil, but I hope it’s clear that given my insatiable appetite for history podcasts I’d be listening to this anyway. Anyway, Uncivil is a show about the American Civil War that busts persistent myths about the conflict as well as uncovers little-known stories that I’m embarrassed I didn’t know before.

Heaven’s Gate

A ten-part series on the Heaven’s Gate cult, which committed mass suicide outside of San Diego back in 1997. I was initially reluctant to dive into this one, I remembered this when it happened and questioned whether there was enough there for more than an episode or two. Not only was I wrong — the story of Heaven’s Gate is deeper and more nuanced than I’d thought — but host Glynn Washington (who also created and hosts the excellent Snap Judgment podcast) grew up in an apocalyptic cult himself, giving the series added depth. (There’s a fascinating episode where the show’s producer interviews Glynn about his own experiences.)

The Grift

A podcast by New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova, The Grift goes deep into the stories of con artists, hoaxers, art forgers, and impostors. My favorite episodes have been the ones that go a little further back in time, like the one about Cassie Chadwick, who convinced people she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.

The History of Exploration

The History of Exploration is a hidden gem of a podcast tracing the history of our earliest voyages into the known, so far covering ancient explorers like Hanno the Navigator, Pytheas, and Polybius. Last update to the series was this past May, so it’s unclear whether it will continue, but the episodes that have been released so far have been excellent.

Slow Burn

Slow Burn is a show from Slate that isn’t just about Watergate, it tries to convey just what it was like to experience the scandal as it was unfolding, when no one knew it would bring down Nixon’s presidency (and yes, the echoes of our own time are intentional). This is another area of history that I thought I already knew decently well (or at least thought I did after having read All the President’s Men), but turns out there was SO much more going on that I’d known nothing about.

What Really Happened?

Hosted by Andrew Jenks, What Really Happened? picks an event, usually from the past few decades and tries to figure out whether the story we’re told is the one we should believe. Episodes range from an incident in 1981 where Muhammad Ali supposedly talked a man out of committing suicide, Michael Jordan’s first retirement from basketball, and the death of Princess Diana.

The Heritage Podcast

Ok, The Heritage Podcast isn’t just about a history — host Will Webb’s goal with this show is to offer a comprehensive liberal arts education and as such also covers philosophy, literature, and anthropology (with more topics to be included I’m sure as he works his way to them). It’s a great resource for learning about all sorts of things that used to be a mandatory part of a person’s education, like the differences between Plato and Aristotle, I wish I’d had this around twenty years ago (I’m only just now reading The Iliad, for example).

Other history podcasts I added to my list this past year, but haven’t listened to yet:

The Assassination – A BBC series about the assassination of Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto

Cults – A series about, you guessed it, cults. They have a two-part episode on Heaven’s Gate that I’m going to check out soon.

The History of the Early Church

The Thread – Season one of this show promises to “connect the dots between John Lennon’s murder and Vladimir Lenin’s revolution 63 years earlier.”

The History of the Mongols

Kingdom, Empire, and Plus Ultra – “Conversations on the history of Portugal and Spain, 1415 – 1898.”

Cameras in phones were treated mainly as an afterthought or weird novelty when they first started showing up in handsets in the early 2000’s. One response to a BBC article back in 2001 about cameras being added to phones in Japan was, “Infinite uses for the teenager, not entirely sure what the rest of us would do with one though.” Sixteen years later it is virtually impossible to find a mobile phone without one. The camera is now a critical — possibly even defining — feature of the smartphone, and yet there is still a remarkable amount of friction to doing more with the default camera on your phone than capturing a photo or a video. 

That will need to change if the camera is going to be the starting point for so much of what we do with our phones and become a sort of visual browser that intermediates and augments our experience of the world. One way for that to happen would be for Apple and Google to allow developers to add lightweight extensions to the OS’s default camera app, like lenses, filters, AR objects, or specialized image recognition capabilities that wouldn’t necessarily justify building a full-blown app. Yes, iOS and Android developers have been able to take advantage of the phone’s camera forever, but they’ve never been able to hook into or add onto the phone’s camera itself. 

Making the camera the place where these experiences live would help overcome context switching, which can be a remarkably high hurdle when it comes to getting users actually to engage with an app. This says nothing of getting them to install one in the first place — something that is going to be especially important with the addition of ARKit to iOS and ARCore to Android this year. It should be as easy as possible for users to point their camera at the world and then augment, enhance, or recognize it. We should be able to have the camera open and then decide what we want to do with it, not the other way around.

There is already a precedent of sorts for this. Apple’s iMessage now has an App Store that goes beyond stickers to offer all sorts of contextual applications for enhancing chats, like Square for sending cash, or games like Crosswords with Friends. The latest figures I was able to find were from March of this year, when the iMessage App Store was estimated to have over 5,000 apps. That number has surely grown. And while Apple could do a lot to improve the experience here, being able to pull apps directly into the messaging experience makes a lot more sense than forcing users to jump out of what they’re doing and into something else. 

We might see something along the lines of what I’m thinking come from Google first. Earlier this month they announced AR Stickers (basically 3D objects which can be inserted into scenes) for the camera of their line of flagship Pixel phones. They also unveiled Lens, which adds a number of computer vision-driven experiences to the Pixel’s camera, like translating text written in other languages, identifying flowers, or pulling up ratings and reviews of a business simply by taking a photo of a storefront. Right now these are first-party, not third-party apps, but it’s not difficult to envision developers being able to augment the Lens experience in a variety of ways. Lens will be rolling out to Pixel phones soon, but it’s expected to trickle down to other Android phones sooner or later. 

Apps which offer their own camera experiences won’t go away, but opening up the camera as a sort of platform-within-a-platform would offer greater flexibility and intelligence to our devices than we have today. It would allow developers to add specialized image recognition capabilities, giving us phones which are better at knowing what they’re looking it. It would also reduce the friction involved with using lenses, 3D objects, and other contextually-driven and location-based AR content and experiences, which wouldn’t have to be siloed into their own apps (or only usable within Snapchat, Facebook, etc.). But perhaps most importantly, it would take us a step towards better understanding and defining the future we are headed towards, where screens themselves become secondary to the augmented view of the world we will have through smartglasses. Even if that future is still a few (or more) years away, we are approaching a time when a handheld screen with a field of icons will no longer make any sense when our expectations will be to have interfaces and experiences which surface intelligently within our field of view. Building great UX and UI for the post-smartphone world will take time, but opening up the camera would help us begin to figure this out. 

The first time I ever met John Borthwick was at an event where we about to speak together on stage. About an hour later we were nearly booed off that stage. 

It was November of 2003 and back then he was working at Time Warner, which had recently stopped calling itself “AOL Time Warner.” I was the editor of a new-ish gadget blog called Gizmodo. I’d been asked to speak at Time Warner’s annual executive retreat about “convergence,” which at the time was a very hot buzzword that had something to do with the shift from analog to digital media. Given my area of expertise they wanted someone to come in and discuss how all these crazy new devices like iPods, smartphones (the Treo 600 had just hit), and connected media players were going to change the media landscape. 

I wasn’t their first choice for this. Maybe not even their second or third. Whoever had been slated to give this talk had canceled at the last minute, and they were looking for a replacement. Supposedly, the speaker had been Steve Jobs. This was probably right at the tail end of that window when anyone could get him to speak at an event like this (remember he was trying to get big media companies to support the iTunes Store, which had launched earlier that year). Regardless of who it was, Upendra Shardanand, who was at Time Warner then, and I were acquainted, and he thought I’d make a good backup speaker and so reached out and asked me if I’d do it. There wasn’t much time to get something together, but after a bit of back and forth with the team there we decided that the format would be me on stage with a high-level exec interviewing me as I went through demos of various new technologies, including how to watch video on a smartphone, record TV on a Media Center PC, stream video from a PC to your TV over WiFi, etc. It’s all stuff that we don’t even think about now because it’s so commonplace, but at the time was about as niche you could get. The exec who’d be on stage chatting with me? That was John Borthwick. 

I spent the next few days gathering up all the gear I needed for the demos and prepping so I could run through everything without a hitch. I remember being a little stressed out trying to find an HP Media Center PC in stock at my local BestBuy, but eventually I was able to buy one. I spent the evening before prepping all of my gear and getting the demos ready. The next morning I headed over to the venue and got ready for my big entrance, which the organizers decided would consist of me riding in on a Segway and then dropping it off and bounding onto the stage to tell people about the future!

Up on stage John guided me through the different parts of the presentation, asking me questions and moving us along from demo to demo. Everything was going smoothly until I got to the part where I wanted to show how easy it was to download video off the internet and stream it from the hard drive to your PC to your TV via a WiFi-enabled DVD player that Gateway used to sell that supported DivX files. I’d torrented an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm for the demo, forgetting that the show aired on HBO, which was owned by Time Warner. We were about three seconds in before the HBO and Time Warner execs started booing and hissing. Keep in mind that this was just a couple of years after Napster had upended the music industry and presumably the collected assembly of high-powered media execs wanted to get some insight into what was coming next for video on the internet and how they might avoid that same fate, not a primer on how to pirate their IP. 

Flummoxed, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, which was, “Look, I don’t even have cable, I don’t really need Time Warner at all to watch this show,” which as you can imagine, did not do anything to win the audience over to my side. John managed to calm things down a bit and move us along to the last bit of the presentation before I sheepishly exited the stage. I hadn’t had a ton of public speaking experience at that point, and none of it involved being booed at, so it was a little rough. I’m not sure I slept much that night.

A few days later I received a very nice note in the mail from Dick Parsons, who was CEO of Time Warner at the time, thanking me for my talk and saying that even though it wasn’t pleasant, it was important for them to hear what I’d had to say.   

I didn’t speak to John afterward — I was way too embarrassed — but somehow everything worked out. Two years later, in 2005,  AOL (which was by now a subsidiary of Time Warner) bought the company I’d started a few months after all this happened. By 2008 I’d reconnected with John courtesy of mutual friend Om Malik, and a year later his startup studio, betaworks, invested in another startup of mine (AOL also ended up buying that company, oddly enough). Two years ago, as I was preparing to leave AOL for the second time, John asked me to join betaworks and help raise a new seed fund. Now, fourteen years after being booed on stage together, John and I (along with Matt Hartman) are partners in the new betaworks ventures seed fund. 

Have we been thinking about what makes for great VR in the wrong way? There’s a lot of anxiety in the industry lately about sluggish consumer adoption rates, which have been slower than hoped after last year’s launch of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Sony’s Playstation VR. This anxiety is only compounded when comparing time spent using VR headsets against that of smartphones (which all of us use off and on all day now), television (which still consumes 5 hours of the average American’s day), and console gaming.
 
It’s still early, so it’s understandable that adoption is happening slowly, but what if total time spent is the wrong benchmark for determining whether VR is valuable to us? This question had been gnawing away at me for the past year or so since I picked up HTC’s Vive headset, but it was only after playing the new co-operative quest games that were recently added to popular social VR game Rec Room, that I was finally able to put my finger on it. [I should disclose that betaworks ventures is an investor in Against Gravity, the company behind Rec Room, but to be clear the reason we invested in Rec Room is because it’s awesome; hopefully I still have some cred in these matters.] Rec Room currently has two quests: The Quest for the Golden Trophy, which is a dungeon crawler where you use virtual swords, bows, and crossbows to battle a variety of enemies through a number of different levels; and The Rise of Jumbotron, an Eighties-themed laser tag-style campaign that involves defeating hordes of robots. 
 
Neither quest breaks new ground thematically, but that’s not the point. Playing in room-scale VR, where you’re physically moving around, brings an entirely new level of immersiveness to the experience and Against Gravity got a bunch of little details right about the collaborative game play. Both quests are challenging — you almost certainly need three other players along for the ride to finish it — but it’s not so hard that you can’t get through it with some persistence, and the first time I played The Quest for the Golden Trophy it took me and the crew of three other players I’d never met before about 45 minutes to get through it. 
 
Forty-five minutes of gameplay would be short for a AAA title like GTA V or Skyrim (I’m about 55 hours into Skyrim), but what struck me was was how satisfying it felt after I was done. For those forty-five minutes I was entirely immersed in the experience, working hard not to let down the three strangers I’d been randomly paired up with, and absolutely ecstatic when after several tries we were able to complete it. But what I hadn’t expected was that at the end I was perfectly content to take my headset off and go back to the real world. I didn’t want to keep playing or to spend a couple more hours inside of my headset. Playing The Quest was like eating a satisfying meal, one where I didn’t leave feeling either hungry or overstuffed. 

It was one of the best experiences I’ve had to date in VR and one that’s stuck with me, and it has me wondering if a lot of us have been focusing on the wrong things when it comes to creating great VR experiences. It’s natural to want to contextualize VR by comparing it to smartphones, television, and game consoles, the other tech platforms it most closely resembles, but that would be a mistake. Mobile is something which we thread throughout every waking moment of our day, but in sort of a light way. We check our phones a hundred or more times a day, but usually for no more than a few minutes at a time. It’s not hard to watch TV or play console (and PC) games for hours and hours upon end. 
 
VR is different. The best VR experiences are heavily concentrated–they draw you completely in and demand more of you sensorially, emotionally, and (if you have a room-scale headset like the Rift or Vive) physically. Judging VR on the same terms as either mobile (as something that we use throughout the day or even every day) or console and PC gaming (as something we can do for hours at a time) doesn’t make sense. Maybe we’ll only spend forty-five minutes a week using VR, but what we’ll get during that time is something so immersive and engrossing that it might be the most engaging, fun, or productive forty-five minutes of your week. 
 
I don’t quite know what this means in terms of where VR goes. In some sense spending time in VR starts to look more like a luxury good than anything else, something that you don’t consume constantly, but when you do you savor it and come away immensely satisfied. If that’s the case, the benchmark for a good VR experience should be something so good that you’ll be happy to take off your headset when you’re done. This has all kinds of implications for what kinds of VR products should be created and which businesses should be built — I won’t pretend to know the answers here — but I’m convinced that VR startups which obsess over offering people the best forty-five minutes of their week will have the best chance of figuring it out. 

Voice interfaces were all over CES this year. Gadget makers added support for voice-based computing to just about everything they could, ranging from stuff you’d expect like, TVs, speakers, and smartphones, to ones which are little more out there, such as refrigerators, wireless routers, and even air purifiers.

The point is that voice is shaping up to be one of the next big computing interfaces. That’s good news for Amazon, which as Ben Thompson lays out in an excellent piece of analysis from earlier this month, has a golden opportunity with its Alexa voice computing platform to build a successful operating system. They failed to accomplish this when they forked Android for their line of Fire tablets and phones (well, just one phone). Ben does a better job than I could of explaining the business models around operating systems and how and why they can be so fantastically profitable, so please go read that piece. Suffice it to say, Alexa gives Amazon a shot at owning a primary computing interface, not unlike how Apple owns iOS or Microsoft owns Windows.

Alexa has proven to be remarkably popular with consumers. While they have not released sales figures, Amazon’s line of Alexa-powered Echo speakers are estimated to be present in around seven million US households and appear to have been a hit this past holiday shopping season, with Amazon’s companion app for the Echo being the 5th most popular free iOS app the day after Christmas. (It probably didn’t hurt that Amazon offered the smaller Echo Dot speaker for just $39, making it a nice, but not-too-expensive gift option.) Meanwhile, partners ranging from Ford, LG, Lenovo, Whirlpool, Huawei, and DISH have been integrating it into their products. With over 7,000 “Alexa skills” and counting made by third-party developers, for now they have a lead over their competitors, which include Google (which is a partner in betaworks’ Voicecamp accelerator), Apple, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent, Samsung, which recently acquired Viv. However, for Amazon to maintain its lead — or for Google or anyone else wanting to build a voice-based computing platform for that matter — it’s going to need to do what practically every successful operating system has done: be a great platform for developers. That means enabling others to build massively successful apps on top of it which in turn develop into massively successful businesses.

The phrase “killer app” gets tossed around casually these days, but Amazon doesn’t necessarily need something that’ll drive sales of the Echo all on its own, like how VisiCalc, a spreadsheet app, did for the Apple II back in the day (though of course it wouldn’t hurt). You can see how the iPhone didn’t truly take off until Apple opened iOS up to developers, and even then it took a little while until someone built Instagram, which turned out to be one of the first massively successful apps. Instagram made iOS more valuable and useful to both Apple and its users, and other developers, seeing that success, were driven to create even more apps for the platform, making iOS even more valuable for Apple and its users.

Alexa has over 7,000 skills, and while there are some great ones out there, so far there a killer third-party app for it hasn’t emerged. What’s tricky is that it’s very difficult for any platform maker to engender this intentionally, since you can’t just magically make it happen with aggressive dev evangelism. Part of the challenge here is that with any new computing interface it takes time to figure out how to create apps and services that feel “native” to the platform. Platform makers also need to offer a good SDK and the right APIs; often devs are too limited in what they can build in the early days of a new OS. Then there are issues around monetization (whether it’s ads, in-app purchases, commerce, etc) and discovery (i.e. how users are going to find and share their apps); according to a report by VoiceLabs, 69% of Alexa skills have one or zero consumers, and retention numbers are poor. People will build plenty of stuff for fun when a platform is new and growing fast, but at some point they want to build businesses around those products. If app makers can’t acquire users or make money, they’re not going to invest their time into building for a new platform. Not surprisingly, there are still lots of open questions around how to accomplish either of those on voice platforms.

If you get this stuff right, then with enough experimentation (and time) others will eventually be able to build compelling, innovative products which couldn’t exist anywhere else. The success of these kinds of products is almost impossible to predict beforehand, yet their emergence feels entirely obvious in retrospect, which is a major reason why we’re doing our Voicecamp accelerator. We want to take a bunch of teams building promising new products for voice and create the right circumstances for them to explore what works and what doesn’t when it comes to voice. It’s possible that at the end of Voicecamp we’ll have a group of noble, but failed, experiments in trying to figure this out. However, we also strongly believe that taking that risk is worth it if there’s a shot that one of them will build the first great voice app.

2016 was a pivotal year for VR. The launch of four major new platforms — the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift CV1, Sony’s PSVR, and Google Daydream VR — meant that VR was finally coming into its own (even if headset sales weren’t as robust as hoped).

It was also a big year for VR for me personally. I helped make three VR-related investments for betaworks (in Boom.tv and two others that haven’t yet been announced). I bought an HTC Vive headset, built a PC to power it, converted my guest bedroom into a VR den, and then proceeded to spend a lot of time there (favorite titles include Google Earth VR, Battle Dome, Rec Room, ZenBlade, Tilt Brush, and Smashbox). I started, and then proceed to neglect, a weekly newsletter called VR Links.

A year ago I asked eight questions about VR in 2016, and a few days ago I shared some of the answers I’ve found. It only makes sense that I follow up with some more questions about VR in 2017, so here are eight more that I’m asking:

Will Apple skip VR altogether?

It looks increasingly likely. I doubt we will see an AR product from them this year – despite some rumors going around, it still feels too early – but there’s no sign of them introducing any kind of VR headset either, and Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear that while he thinks AR will be big, VR won’t be by comparison. I’ve never seen a CEO of a major tech company go out of their way to predict that a market isn’t going to big and then go ahead and introduce a product for that category, so it might be safe to say that Apple is going to ignore VR.

If Apple does ignore VR, does that damage the prospects for VR app and game makers? There’s a widespread assumption that one real quick way for VR to go mainstream would be for Apple to introduce a headset. But let’s say they never do. It seems like that would result in a stunted market for VR apps and games, right? There are an estimated 90 million active iPhone users in the United States and most aren’t going to switch to Android so they can use Daydream VR or buy a high-end headset like the Rift or Vive (to say nothing of the PC required to power it). That means that if Apple doesn’t introduce a solution for them, there’s a good chance they won’t experience VR beyond the very low-end experience offered by existing third-party headsets like Google Cardboard. This brings me to my next question:

 

Will 2017 be the year we see some high profile VR startups flame out?

Smart founders spent 2015 and 2016 raising enough money to get them through what could be some lean times for user growth this year and next, but there are likely a bunch of startups which will need to either raise more money or get to profitability this year. Both will be challenging. The addressable market for VR will still be relatively small, making it tough for most startups to make enough money from either sales or advertising to survive, and VCs are reluctant to pour more money into unprofitable companies unless they have “momentum”. 2017 already saw its first notable casualty when Envelop VR, which raised a total of $7.5 million from investors, announced it was shutting down earlier this week.

Will 2017 be the year that VR breaks out of its niche?

In my post last week I wrote,

One big difference between smartphones and VR is that even before the iPhone was announced it seemed inevitable…that smartphones would become ubiquitous… With VR it is still very much an open question whether it will remain a relatively niche market or find a wider audience.

I do agree with Tim Cook that AR will be more widely-adopted than VR, at least eventually, but it’s very hard to tell right now whether VR on its own becomes something that most people incorporate into their lives. It’s entirely possible that VR’s appeal only extends to those who want the most immersive experience possible, whether that’s for gaming, work, or entertainment, while for everyone else VR is a curiosity that they might try out from time to time, but never feel the need to use on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean that large, successful businesses focusing on VR can’t or won’t be built — I’m betting some will be — but I doubt that VR ever has the market penetration smartphones do.

If this were to be the year that VR breaks out of its niche, the natural question to then ask is, what drives that change? I have to admit that it’s hard for me to see it happening in 2017 given the current landscape. It’d be dumb to definitively rule out something unlikely like a mega hit app or game that gets millions of people to go out and buy a headset, but I tend to agree with Joe Ludwig of Valve, who recently said on Twitter that the market for VR is going to be limited until mobile VR “adopts the features of high end VR.” Could that happen this year? Well, that leads me to my next question:

will we see the first all-in-one headsets this year?

The short answer: probably not. But they’re not as far away as they once were.

So what am I talking about? Well, right now the headset market breaks roughly into two parts: high-end headsets that need to be powered by a PC or game console (like the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift CV1, and PSVR) and mobile headsets where you pop in a smartphone (like Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream VR). All-in-one headsets fit in between those two categories, offering the wire-free experience of mobile with the room-scale positional tracking (which anyone who has tried it will tell you completely transforms the VR experience) found in high-end headsets.

Oculus teased us with a glimpse of their “Santa Cruz” all-in-one headset prototype at Oculus Connect in October, Google at least was working on a tweener headset (and may still be), and a startup called Eonite Perception recently showed off a solution for mobile positional tracking. Whether there’s enough of a market for a third category is an open question, but it could be an attraction option to introduce higher-quality VR to a wider audience which isn’t prepared to spend $1000 and up for a PC and another $600-$800 for a headset. And as Kyle Russell suggested when we talked about this a couple of months ago, in places like the US where the high-end of the smartphone market is dominated by the iPhone, offering a dedicated tweener headset might be the only way for Google to get Daydream VR on the heads of people who are never going to buy an Android phone. Facebook might be thinking those same lines and offer the Santa Cruz headset as a solution for anyone who doesn’t have a Samsung phone or doesn’t want to spend the money on a Rift and a PC. But as I mentioned above, we may not see any of this come to fruition in 2017, the technical hurdles are still significant. 

What will VR look like on Microsoft’s forthcoming “Project Scorpio” Xbox, which is due out before the end of 2017?

We know that it will be powerful enough to offer the kind of high-quality VR you can only get with the Rift or Vive on a PC right now, but beyond that we don’t know all that much. Will they build a headset specifically for it, or will it be meant for use with a Windows Holographic VR headset? What about room-scale tracking? Will the Scorpio offer something comparable to what the Vive offers there?

Could harassment kill social VR before it starts?

Trolling and harassment are a persistent problem on social platforms, so it’s not surprising that they’re found on a nascent platform like VR. However, as Jordan Belamaire described in October in a post on Medium about being virtually groped while playing QuiVR, sharing a virtual spaces offers opportunities to harass and intimidate that go beyond what can be done on Twitter or Facebook. You can’t enthuse about the potential for empathy and emotional intimacy that presence brings to VR without acknowledging that those same qualities can lead to abusive experiences as well. The only question is what we can do about it, because if we don’t, VR risks becoming a medium where bad actors are able to drive out anyone not willing to submit to a torrent of abuse in order to participate. The makers of QuiVR quickly responded with a set of tools to mitigate harassment; I’ve chatted with other developers building social games and experiences that have been trying to address these issues as well.

How does Oculus respond to the Vive?

HTC made an impressive showing at CES last week, introducing a bunch of new stuff, including the Vive Tracker, a motion tracking device which will make it easy to turn all sorts of devices into VR accessories. The Vive Tracker will expand the range and immersiveness of VR experiences users will be able to enjoy, including highly-accurate gloves which track hand and finger motions. Once the Vive Tracker ships, Oculus, which just barely was able to ship its Touch controllers before the end of the year, will be playing catch up once again and it’s reasonable to expect some announcement from them of a similar device before too long.

Also shown off at CES were a handful of 3rd-party wireless adapters for the Vive. Removing the wires that tether users to a PC is a key objective for high-end headsets like the Rift and the Vive, but getting there requires high-bandwidth, low latency solutions based on new-ish wireless standards like WiGig to work. New HTC partner Intel is said to be working on an adapter for the Vive as well, and there are rumors that the Vive 2, which may or may not be announced this year, will come with wireless built-in. We haven’t heard much from Oculus here about cutting the cord on the CV1, but again, it’s likely that we’ll hear something about this sooner or later.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as the questions you have about VR in 2017. I’m excited to see what this year brings and I promise I’ll have a follow-up in twelve months time!