Transcript:
Hi, I’m Scott Hutcheson of the Strategic Web. This is the third video in my series on maturity or adoption models. These models show how people progressively add a new activity or technology into their lives. In the last video I went over how essential it is for organizations to build capacity to even know how to learn to adopt a new activity. Naturally, this applies to consumer behavior in the same way that it applies to organizational behavior.
To get a better sense of how consumers adapt to and adopt a new technology let’s take a look at two products from the same company, Apple’s Vision Pro and the iPhone. Both of these are great examples of how products can succeed or struggle in an adoption model. But before we go over the adoption of the Vision Pro or virtual reality in general, let’s first get some context by reviewing the launch of the iPhone.
The iPhone launched in 2007 at a price point of around $600. I was working at a small web design agency then, and our owner was excited about them. So he got each one of us a generation one iPhone. And it was definitely different from any other smartphone on the market at the time. Though, a key aspect here is that there were other popular smartphones already in use. By the time the iPhone came out, RIM’s Blackberry, which launched in 1999 at around $300, enjoyed such dedicated fans that it was nicknamed the CrackBerry due to their seemingly compulsive use.
And before that, there were Palm Pilots that premiered in 1996. But, these devices didn’t show up on the market in a vacuum either. There were decades of roads and bridges built leading us to the smartphone and eventually the iPhone.
So let’s work backwards a bit more just to see how the pathways were laid out.
Cell phones launched in the 1980s and had become ubiquitous in the culture by the late 1990s. Consumers had become conditioned to expect to have phone service in their pockets.
Before the iPhone, there was the iPod. The original iPod launched in October of 2001. By the time the iPhone launched Apple had sold almost a hundred million iPods, and this doesn’t include MP3 players from other brands. By 2007 consumers were used to carrying around pocket-sized devices that played thousands of songs.
Before that we had CD players. These were less convenient than iPods but still offered great audio quality, easy track selection and virtually the same portability. And while still physical media, CDs were relatively easy to transport. After all, remember these?
Yet, even before CDs, we had the ubiquitous portable cassette player made most popular by the Sony Walkman, which launched all the way back in 1979. These were less convenient than CDs would be but still well-established the ability to have inexpensive portable music players to listen to the music you chose.
And before the cassette player, we had portable transistor radios, which were available as early as the mid 1950s. Consumers couldn’t choose their music, but they could take a radio with them wherever they went.
So prior to the iPhone, there were more than 70 years of lead up and advancing the UX adoption that established consumer experiences with portable media.
But wait, there’s more.
Nintendo launched the game boy in 1989. Throughout the 1990s, it gained popularity and continued to offer more advanced capabilities. Because of this people were used to viewing and interacting with media and controlling the functions of a game on a small screen. Portable GPS navigation emerged for consumers in the 1990s. People got used to finding their way with turn by turn directions. Even inexpensive and small digital cameras were becoming available in the early 2000s.
You can probably see how our culture spent decades progressing through the adoption stages to be ready for the iPhone. Once it launched, familiarity, values and established heuristics allowed people to find connection points to make getting used to each of these incrementally advancing devices easy and natural. We can see how most of the experiences needed to make an iPhone successful were at least at a stage three of solid incorporation and probably at a stage four of integration for much of the public.
Virtual reality as a technology has technically been around since the 1980s, though, at that time, it was mostly used as an experimental novelty or in highly specialized situations. It wasn’t consumer focused and therefore had not really been progressively gaining use and popularity like the examples I already mentioned.
Now, augmented reality has been a bit more popular. It’s now been available through smartphones and tablets for more than a decade. It’s likely that you’ve used it to see how furniture art looks in your house, or maybe you’ve used it to play games like Pokemon Go. Though, AR isn’t something that we’ve come to rely on in the same way we have portable music gaming or web browsing. There still aren’t that many popular applications for it in the marketplace.
In 2023, there was a total of just over 4 million VR \AR headset sold in the US from all brands by comparison, apple sold around 11 million iPhone units in the US in 2008 and 231 million units in 2023. There just hasn’t been the demand for the VR \AR headset experience from consumers. It’s nothing like the growing demand for smartphone experiences prior to the iPhone launch.
And remember Google glass? It was less bulky and simpler than the Vision Pro.
So, it could have been a precursor for VR, according to adoption models, but typical consumers didn’t want those either.
So what’s needed to offer the roads and bridges for widespread VR, AR headset adoption? In short, our culture needs to have common and frequent experiences that lead us through the maturity model of adopting such advanced and unusual activities. Most of the iPhone user experiences were already being done with other devices. In some ways, the Vision Pro is kind of like the original, bulky cell phones, but it’s burdened with more complexity. The first bulky cell phones required few new activities and merely replicated familiar activities. After all, cell phones were just phones. Consumers were already used to making phone calls and that behavior didn’t really change. The portability was new. The primary use case was not.
Cell phone and smartphone use both before and after the iPhone launch also have a key behavior aspect missing from VR behaviors, frequency of use. Even avid VR headset users likely only use the device maybe two or three sessions a day for longer sessions. And while we’re all probably guilty of hours of doom scrolling, it’s not the length of use that makes smartphones fully innate in our culture. That’s a stage five of maturity. It’s the repetition. Something becomes a habit by doing it a lot, meaning often. Most of us use our smart phones well over a hundred times a day in short sessions. Even regular cell phones were used dozens of times a day once texting was introduced. Currently VR headsets might be used in long sessions, but likely not with high returning frequency each day.
Interacting with a virtual environment and wearing a headset is a big shift from a handheld device. And yes, users can do cool things with VR. They can position virtual screens in a fixed point in virtual space and use their hands and eyes to interact with virtual elements. VR definitely allows for lots of virtual screens in creative locations, likely more than most of us would already have. But, we do already have lots of screens in our lives between smartphones, tablets, laptops, TVs, and other monitors. So, are consumers in a place to value even more screens? Screens that are merely virtual? Screens that can only be accessed while wearing the device on your face?
Also, there was no haptic response with the Vision Pro out of the box. A haptic response has generally a type of vibration you can feel when you interact with the solid surface of a device. These haptic responses are less common today with our more advanced adoption, but they were critical when the iPhone premiered. There are a few companies out there making some haptic peripherals, but they’re expensive, kind of buggy and not well integrated into current VR headsets or apps. Plus wearing them is yet another experience consumers will need to adopt and product they’ll need to purchase.
For now Vision Pro users have to interact with elements not only without haptic responses, but without the very real feeling of touching a physical device. And while the onboard cameras do help recreate the outside environment, people still must put on a headset over their eyes. This reduces their awareness of the environment around them, which can be disconcerting or even disorienting. There’s just no good example of people doing this with other consumer technology like we saw with smartphones.
More than a hundred years ago, there were devices known as stereoscopes. People used these to view 3D versions of photographs, sort of, but they’re just relics now and were never that popular in the first place. I don’t know, does a View-Master count? Probably not.
To make VR headsets truly productive users will also have to get used to using a real keyboard with their peripheral vision limited or a virtual keyboard that they can’t feel, which don’t work that well yet anyway. And then there’s the interaction with elements like virtual screens, even scifi films that depict this usually show them being used without a headset. Even Iron Man’s experience inside the suit is mostly just a heads up display, not virtual reality. Current Vision Pro users report getting used to moving the screens around pretty quickly, but admit that it’s not natural at first.
So, where is the VR experience on a maturity or adoption model? For most consumers, it’s probably at a stage one, which is ignore. This is the stage identified by a lack of awareness or awareness with skepticism. Basically, you just don’t see the value in it. Though for a few, it could be at a stage two. This is the investigation stage identified by ad hoc experimentation. Though, even these consumers are just trying out VR and experimenting to see where and how it might be valuable to them.
And while I’m really focusing on consumers here, we can’t ignore the business side. Brands are required to develop apps and content suited specifically for a VR or AR environment. This is way more complicated than standard two dimensional content or even video.
So, businesses also lack the adoption model progression to know what to produce and how to do it. The gaming industry has already been experimenting with AR and VR, so it’s likely they’ll lead the way. Though there is one other industry that has a history of early technology adoption to create content, but uh. Yeah, I’m not going to go over that here.
In short, I’m not against VR headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro. There’s lots of cool aspects to them. And we could see some really useful examples in the future. Maybe they will become popular and be common within the next decade. Though, I have to admit that even if I got one for free, I’m not sure I would make it part of my regular device usage right now. It just doesn’t fill needs for me that I can’t more easily accomplish elsewhere in more familiar in convenient ways. And, this is coming from someone who had a generation one iPhone. I even bought my first DVD player in 1998 for $350. I’m not a technology curmudgeon.
So have any of you used or even own a Vision Pro? Do you like it? Do you love it? Will it change your life or are you like most people and you’re just waiting for it to offer something you can’t live without? Let me know what you think.
And, if you’re still here, thanks for watching to the end. This concludes my series on maturity models. You can watch the other two by checking out the links in the description or the comments.
Thanks and see you soon.