I’ve put out a lot of predictions about what I think is going to happen with virtual and augmented reality this year. My first Story on this covered things that I thought had a 70% chance of happening in 2020; a very high chance, but still had some room for doubt. My second Story covered things I thought had at least a 50% chance of happening. These things are basically hit or miss for this year. Each of these predictions are things that may or may not happen this year, but I am confident enough in them to happen sometime in the future. For this post, I want to cover things that I think have at least a 20% chance of happening in 2020. These are things I think will happen someday, but I think they are less likely to happen in 2020 specifically, for various reasons. Nonetheless, I think developers should keep them in mind, as they will impact the future of what they are developing for with virtual and augmented reality.
Facebook’s Reality Toolkit
One of the big items that hasn’t appeared yet is what I’m dubbing Facebook Reality Toolkit. The idea behind this is simple: Making applications for virtual and augmented reality is difficult. It’s not like designing for traditional apps, and requires entirely new design paradigms. Tools like Unity and Unreal Engine are difficult for newcomers to build with, while higher level tools lack a lot of the more complex features necessary for success (physics capabilities being the biggest miss in many). I believe that Facebook is working on(or will be at some point) a higher level toolkit that fixes many of these issues, while making them more accessible to developers. If you’re building an intense game, then you’ll still want to use something like Unity or Unreal Engine, but if you’re just building a simple application for browsing real-estate, you don’t need all that additional complexity.
I think the chances of Facebook releasing something like this in 2020 are very slim however. This is a huge endeavor, and much of the tech necessary for this does not exist today (especially on the physics side) as far as I’m aware. I’m not sure it would be worthwhile releasing something that does not solve the majority of these issues. Simple things like allowing users to pick an item up are still incredibly complex to achieve, with the majority of solutions…
