How Does Oculus Survive on Mobile?
Oculus and Gear VR need some differentiating factors if they are going to stand a chance against Google’s impending mobile VR takeover. There’s at least three places they could create that differentiation, and one move that could at least help put them on even footing.
Content
At present this is perhaps Oculus’ biggest advantage in the mobile VR space. The platform has more than 700 apps, and while not all of them are great, that’s a much larger library than Daydream which is currently floating around 150.
Oculus could attempt to force content differentiation through funding the development of platform-exclusive content—and this seems likely given past practices—but such deals will become increasingly expensive for the company if the Gear VR install base begins to significantly lag behind the Daydream install base.
Experience/Positioning
Right now, the capabilities of Gear VR and Daydream are nearly identical from a user perspective. Both now offer a motion controller for input, and in fact there’s a number of games that are deployed on both platforms with little to differentiate the experience.
It’s possible that Oculus could push the hardware envelope and dream up some new tech that would fundamentally differentiate the end-user experience on Gear VR compared to Daydream. It looked like inside-out positional tracking could have been that trump card when the company showed off the impressive standalone Rift ‘Santa Cruz’ prototype back in 2016, but Google’s newly announced standalone Daydream headsets also bring inside-out positional tracking to the table.
Other experiential differentiators could be things like eye-tracking, face tracking, mouth tracking, pass-through AR capabilities, and more.
The problem though is that these are all currently high-end capabilities and would likely push the price of Gear VR up, necessitating a “premium” positioning of the product and platform, attempting to pitch it as the ‘high-end of mobile VR’. Doing so seems risky however, as one of mobile VR’s biggest appeals is the low cost.
Developer Tech
Oculus is quite proud of the engineering work they’ve done on their developer tools, and in some cases they can bring distinct performance advantages, allowing developers to create better looking games on the same hardware (or identical looking content on less expensive hardware). For instance, on desktop, Oculus pioneered the ASW technique which managed to reduce the hardware requirements for games on the Oculus platform compared to other VR games.
It isn’t clear if Oculus could create the same advantages in the mobile VR space, but making the lives of developers easier is one way to keep them coming back.
Even Footing by Being Vendor Agnostic
It would likely take a serious rearchitecting of the company’s mobile platform, but Oculus could ditch Samsung as their exclusive partner and make Oculus Home on mobile compatible with any Android smartphone that meets a certain minimum specification, just like Daydream.
Such a move would negate some (but not all) of Daydream’s core advantages as a vendor-agnostic platform and make Gear VR just one headset of many that would support Oculus Home on mobile. Hell, they could even let Daydream headsets work with Oculus Home. This move would compound well with an approach that seeks to differentiate on a content basis, with Oculus potentially pitching their platform as the place to get the best mobile VR content.
And while such a move might seem unlikely due to Oculus’ close partnership with Samsung, given that Oculus wants to succeed as a VR platform in the mobile space—rather than a hardware manufacturer—opening the door to as many devices as possible is in their best interest.
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When Google announced Daydream back at the beginning of 2016 it became immediately apparent that the Google-Samsung-Oculus love triangle was due to face some challenges. There’s no way that this caught Oculus off-guard either, and so I can only imagine they have been planning their next steps in the mobile VR space. We’ll have to wait and see how the company intends to navigate these new challenges, though I would venture to guess that Santa Cruz will play a major role in their forward looking mobile strategy.
