Unity boss says VR hardware still not right for consumers

“They’re not cheap enough, they don’t work well enough… there’s not a lot of content,” says John Riccitiello

Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello has compared VR headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to beta kits, arguing that hardware standards aren’t yet good enough to create a consumer market.

Speaking at Techcrunch Disrupt this week, as reported by Upload VR, Riccitiello was remarkably cool on the current state of VR for the CEO of a company so heavily invested in the market.

“They’re not cheap enough,” he said of the headsets now on the market. “They don’t work well enough, you don’t have enough good control systems, you can’t see your arms and your legs in most of them and use them in an interactive way, there’s not a lot of content.”

Riccitiello continued: “AR and VR is mostly to this day been launched to developers. I mean, name the content. It’s not there yet.”

Riccitiello went on to mention that the main audience for current VR hardware is the enterprise market, and that none of the available headsets amounts to a “consumer launch” for VR.

Whether HTC, Oculus or the many other VR hardware manufacturers would agree with that assessment is an open question. However, it’s clear that all of them are engaged with making headsets more accessible and attractive, through steep price-cuts or hardware innovations like Oculus Go and the HTC Wireless Adapter.