Sluggish sales tipped VR sharply into what the famous “ Hype Cycle” theory from Gartner, a firm of analysts, describes as the “trough of disillusionment”, although 20 have seen it progress to the next stage of that cycle: the “slope of enlightenment” – with fitness one of the app genres doing the lifting.įacebook’s Oculus Quest, released in May 2019, was hailed as a big step forward. Facebook bought its maker for $2bn in 2014 two years after a kickstarter funding campaign and the headset went on commercial sale in 2016. Sales have been disappointing, certainly compared with the bullish expectations when the Oculus Rift headset kicked off the modern VR hardware generation.
In 2016, a research firm, IHS Markit, predicted that by 2020 there would be 81m VR headsets in use globally.Īnd now? In May this year, research firm Omdia, which acquired IHS Markit’s tech division in 2019, estimated that the current base is about 26m units. Video companies love this kind of talk, but in recent years, the outlook for VR technology has looked distinctly mixed. “We don’t see ourselves as a gaming studio, but as a fitness company,” says Cole, adding that FitXR was set up in the belief that “the next computing platform after the smartphone was going to be some kind of mixed reality headset” and that “fitness everywhere would be completely transformed”. The company’s co-founders, Sam Cole and Sameer Baroova, met at business school before founding FitXR in 2016, drawing on Cole’s background in finance and Baroova’s career as a games developer. Other people clearly see something in BoxVR too: in July, the London tech startup behind it, FitXR, announced a funding round of £6m from a group of venture capital investors plus the government’s Innovate UK agency. But over six weeks, BoxVR became a daily habit and, as good exercise should, provided the spark to go walking, eat healthily and leave the giant crate of cider untouched most nights (also a lockdown impulse purchase). Less “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” and more “pant like a water buffalo, flap like a tired kitten” in truth.
In BoxVR you punch a variety of coloured objects in time to music.
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