Threshold Cascade Model in Introduction of VR Technology
Virtual Reality, (usually known as VR), is an emerging technology that replicates a real environment or create an imaginary setting to generate realistic images, sounds and other sensations. Deloitte has expected a surge in the use of VR especially by gamers, predicting it to be a billion-dollar market globally this year. It is interesting to explore how VR spreads out so quickly in the global market within such a short period of time.
Many institutions nowadays are using VR technology. For example, the National Basketball Association of the States is already streaming a live game in VR, Intel recently purchased VR company VOKE to help create “a truly immersive sports experience”, and in the UK a surgery to remove a tumor was streamed live in VR. While we can envision a bright future of VR, the usage rate and the eventual success of this technology depend on its “ability to be fully immersive” in the market according to analysts. Unfortunately, the usage rate of this technology has not reached the critical mass yet.
This phenomenon could be explained by the social contagion and threshold cascade model mentioned in class. It says that people are willing to adopt a new technology if more than a certain fraction of his/her friends are adopting it currently. Therefore, it requires several initial adopters to adopt the VR technology first, and then introduce to those people with fewer friends or lower threshold. For the technologies like VR that are innovative and bring better gaming experience to users, the threshold might generally be lower than that of other behaviors or technologies. However, at the same time, a problem presented to the market. Currently, several VR technologies exist in the market, including Google Daydream, Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, etc. The increasing number of competitors in the market and the incompatibility between different VR platforms will lower the fraction of a person’s friends who play a specific type of VR. This lowers the speed of spread of VR in the market.
Link:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/610232/networks-prepared-live-virtual-reality-experience/
2016 was a big year for VR with the release of the Sony Playstation VR, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and more filling consumers Christmas wish lists for Santa. While the quality of games has been a bit polarising, I can see it gaining more consistency next year as developers gain more experience in the field and issues are ironed out. Financially it will be interesting to see how VR progresses as many indie devs have mentioned how difficult it is to make money from VR games at the moment during a time where the market is so young and lots of gamers don’t own a VR device yet.
http://vrgamersnews.com/index.php/2016/12/19/how-big-will-vr-get-in-2017/