I recently tweeted a link to the latest video from Bjork — Iceland’s odd but always enthralling pop superstar — which is currently being featured at her retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.
The installation for the “Stonemilker” 360-degree music video is supposed to be experienced with an Oculus Rift VR headset, but it’s available in non-interactive formats, too.
Go ahead and check it out. I’ll wait.
Aside from the tortured, phonetic English the experience helps show the promise of VR; the promise that encouraged Facebook (FB) head Mark Zuckerberg to pay $2 billion for Oculus VR last year.
Current Oculus Rift users are power PC gamers and YouTube celebrities like the infantile PewDiePie, a guy with more than 37 million subscribers who makes a living creating profanity-laced video game commentaries. (You can watch Pewds, as he refers to himself, playing an Oculus Rift horror game here.)
But the future is about transporting you to other places in this world as demonstrated by the Bjork video.
Virtual Reality Is on the Cusp of Mainstream
Zuckerberg talked this up in his Facebook post announcing the aquisition last year:
“After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.
“This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”
Mass adoption will happen as the cost of entry falls. Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is leading the way on this front by making a cheap cardboard VR headset that holds your smartphone and uses lenses to provide a quick and easy portal to another place. It’s also making moves in “augmented reality” with an investment in Magic Leap, a company making a lightweight headset that places virtual objects in your field of view.
The next step is motion detection and control, which Leap Motion provides via an $79 USB plug-in peripheral for your PC or Mac along with a collection of apps; it also offers a VR headset mount. Meanwhile, Sony is set to release its Project Morpheus VR headset for the Playstation 4 video game console in early 2016. And Samsung has the Gear VR for its Galaxy S6 phone.
The point: The combination of popular content and cheaper equipment means virtual reality — popularized in 1992’s Lawnmower Man — is finally going mainstream. And as it does, there will be a fresh set of opportunities for investors. And Facebook will be first among them.
Research: Anthony Mirhaydari
Jon Markman writes a daily trading newsletter, Trader’s Advantage, and CounterPoint Options, a service geared towards helping individual traders make steady, consistent profits with the VIX. Check out his Top Stock for 2015 here.
