44
FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
environments. That was the promise that
led Facebook to pay $3 billion for headset
maker Oculus VR in 2014, and every year
since, evangelists have proclaimed virtual
reality the next new thing. Consumer tech
players including Google, HTC, Samsung,
and Sony joined Facebook in a race to bring
consumer-ready headsets to market. Ven-
ture capitalists poured billions into content
development and hardware applications.
Time magazine put the then-22-year-old
founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, on its
cover and announced the technology was
“about to change the world.” Mark Zuck-
erberg in 2017 famously said he wanted
a billion people to be using Oculus head-
sets—though he conspicuously didn’t say
by when.
That omission is understandable. Be-
cause for all the hype-filled promises, virtual
reality remains, well, virtually absent from
everyday American life. Oculus in 2018,
for example, shipped just 354,000 units
of its flagship VR headset, the Oculus Rift,
according to estimates from SuperData, a
gaming-focused research unit of Nielsen.
Contrast that with the more than 17 million
PlayStation 4 game consoles Sony moved in
the same period or global smartphone sales
that year of 1.4 billion, according to IDC.
Consumers are finding that VR is typically
too expensive, too clunky, or too uncomfort-
able, and lacking in content that is worth
trying more than once or twice. Skeptics
compare the experience to the short-lived
3D-TV fad of the early 2010s.
The sluggish adoption has claimed
multiple victims. Cinema operator IMAX,
which used $50 million in venture capitalPAUL MCCARTNEY MADE HIS MODEST CONTRIBUTION to the future of
virtual reality with a little help from a bike mechanic.
The unlikely union of the Beatles great, a bike-shop employee
in Palo Alto, and a promising if underachieving technology
is the accomplishment of Scott Broock, once an enterprising
executive with a fledgling camera company called Jaunt VR. In
2014, Broock offered to pay the mechanic $50 to ride around a
skate park on a BMX bike while being filmed with a specialized
camera rig that could shoot video and record sound in 360 de-
grees—all around and up and down. Broock hoped the bike’s
chain clanging around the fishbowl would be ideal for something
called ambisonic audio, surround sound hearable above, below,
and around the listener.
A few months later, Broock managed to show a clip of the
video to McCartney, who was so impressed that he invited Jaunt
to film his concert the very next night at San Francisco’s his-
toric Candlestick Park, the same venue where the Fab Four had
performed their final show 48 years earlier. The startup company
quickly mobilized and recorded one of the first videos of its kind,
an immersive stadium concert film that would give a viewer the
sensation of being among the pulsating crowd. Broock left Jaunt
in 2016 and subsequently served a yearlong stint as a “global VR
evangelist” for YouTube. But he still looks back at the concert vid-
eo as a breakthrough achievement. “There’s a moment recorded
in time of Paul McCartney playing in front of people captured
in a way that, maybe 100 years from now, seems like black-and-
white films” —primitive but pioneering. “That’s a powerful thing.”
The vintage film comparison—think: grainy footage of silent
passersby shuffling around in top hats among horse-drawn car-
riages and Model T–esque cars—is standard fare for virtual real-
ity’s boosters. Just as movies showed viewers places they’d never
go, VR would transport them directly into those same filmed
ATTENTION DEFICIT: Despite $100 million in
funding, Jaunt abandoned VR, shifting its focus
to augmented reality. “It just wasn’t making
sense for our company,” says CEO Mitzi Reaugh.