I’ve claimed that 2016 will be the year VR reaches the rest of us. As it does, we will replace the largely theoretical arguments around which products are better than others with cold, hard facts. The data that we’re used to collecting for web and mobile apps will soon be available for VR apps, and that data is going to decide who will get funded, and who won’t.
Well, sort’ve. VR is a markedly different medium than web or mobile. Not everyone will agree on the ways to benchmark and assess performance in this new medium. At Lightspeed, we’ve looked at many VR startups and have discussed what outlier performance should look like, given where VR lies on the adoption curve today.
Our framework favors engagement over growth. The argument is akin to the one Eric Reis makes in The Lean Startup that the “value hypothesis” must be proven before the “growth hypothesis.” Before you invest behind growth, you must demonstrate that you’re delivering true value to a set of users.
So what would proof of value, or engagement, look like in VR? To first order, we must move away from experiences that support session times measured in minutes towards those measured in hours. Admittedly, very few web or mobile apps have session times that long, and in VR this is an even higher bar because comfort cannot be taken for granted. For example, the below shows average monthly minutes vs. penetration across the major social media platforms; and the leaders in engagement — Facebook and Snapchat — are below an hour per day on average:
We are setting the bar high, however, because the concept of immersion isn’t useful if a user doesn’t want to be immersed for a long time. We want to find experiences from which users must be forcibly pried away — where, for about an hour, they prefer virtual to actual reality! We’ve begun to benchmark companies based on session length for this reason.
We are also looking for a diversity of uses inside an app during that long session. Watching a single video for an hour in VR can be compelling, but its engagement is highly correlated to the quality of that individual video. A more repeatable model is to enable a variety of behaviors that create the “flow” we’re used to in popular web and mobile apps. For this reason, we have a bias towards platform-like apps over single purpose content-driven apps.
If VR developers get session time and diversity of use right, we think those apps will grow faster than others and achieve tentpole status in the VR ecosystem. We’re interested to see if these success factors resonate and are open to your suggestions on how to refine our framework going forward.
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