finnCap Tech Chat | Outside the box

Nowadays our daily Tech Team chats include mentions of ‘unlocking a new club last night’ or ‘playing the desert course with my new putter.’ No, we are not breaking lockdown rules, but have started playing VR crazy golf on the Oculus Quest headsets we got for Christmas. In fact, a quiet after-work round of mini-golf in the evenings has become a popular way for finnCap colleagues to both socialise and chat about business. Playing 18 holes of minigolf while strolling around a tropical island or a mountain in the Arizona desert is a refreshing and truly marvellous way of catching up with (up to 5) colleagues when you have been stuck in a house for months... we can thoroughly recommend it as a way of escaping the confined little boxes of Teams and Zoom. VR meetings are more realistic, spontaneous and so much more intuitive. No-one wants to miss out, and more of us are entering this new reality. 

The increasing internal adoption of VR at finnCap isn’t an anomaly. Google Trends data shows that this Christmas, Oculus was searched about half as much as the Apple Watch, compared to 25% as much in 2019. In the next 2-3 years, the adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is likely to continue to grow, as new AR/VR headsets and glasses are expected to launch from the major tech players, with: Apple expected to launch a high-end VR headset in 2022 and AR glasses from 2023, Facebook/Oculus aiming to release a pair of smartglasses with Ray-Ban in 2021 ahead of more ambitious projects, and Microsoft potentially building on its enterprise-focused HoloLens 2 with a consumer-focused device.

As we explain in today’s finnCap tech quarterly, all of this makes us think that we are currently in the equivalent phase to the iPod phase of 2002-06 for smartphone adoption. The iPod launched in 2001 with a focus on changing how we listen to music, and in the years that followed it saw strong take-up and drove growth for Apple, familiarised users with the capabilities of a portable device that could fit into your pocket, and enabled Apple to develop and scale the technologies required for the iPhone. Mass adoption of the smartphone then followed the launch of the iPhone in 2007. We believe that the current focus of extended reality (‘XR’) devices on VR resembles the iPod’s focus on music, and that this will pave the way for the development of new AR devices in the next 5 years. At the same time, the success of the iPod within music highlights that the market for current VR devices is far from small.

While the major tech players are likely to drive the capabilities of devices in response to the substantial technological challenges of XR, they’re likely to create an ecosystem that builds upon what already exists on iOS, Android, and Windows. This creates opportunities for a range of UK-listed companies to build from their existing XR positions, including MelodyVR/Napster, VR Education, Immotion, Oxford Metrics, Dev Clever, SimiGon, Pennant, Eleco, AVEVA, and Filtronic.

As we look at the transformational potential of XR and immersive content for companies like VR Education and MelodyVR/Napster, it’s important to remember that in 2000, Apple was predominantly a PC company. 20 years after the launch of the iPod, the CEO of Apple believes ‘it [AR] will happen in a big way, and we will wonder when it does how we lived without it – kind of like we wonder how we lived without our phone today.’ Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg similarly said in 2015 that ‘our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years. It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile – especially once we reach AR – since you can always have it on… Once you have a good VR/AR system, you no longer need to buy phones or TVs or many other physical objects – they can just become apps in a digital store.’ That’s all for a few years’ time. Before then, if you fancy talking tech over a round of golf, you know where to find us. Usually on the desert course. 

Happy Friday