![]() “We saw in our own data that this is gonna take a while to get to the place it needs to be,” says CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, adding that the wait will be “years, not months.” Even Jaunt, despite the boost from McCartney and more than $100 million of funding, including from Disney, couldn’t make a go of VR. And CCP Games, a popular Icelandic video game developer, laid off 100 people and ceased its development of new VR projects in 2017. Google’s in-house VR film studio, Spotlight Stories, folded earlier this year. Cinema operator IMAX, which used $50 million in venture capital funding to open virtual reality arcades in cities from New York to Bangkok, shuttered all the locations after just two years. The sluggish adoption has claimed multiple victims. Skeptics compare the experience to the short-lived 3D-TV fad of the early 2010s. Consumers are finding that VR is typically too expensive, too clunky, or too uncomfortable, and lacking in content that is worth trying more than once or twice. Contrast that with the more than 17 million PlayStation 4 game consoles Sony moved in the same period or global smartphone sales that year of 1.4 billion, according to IDC. Oculus in 2018, for example, shipped just 354,000 units of its flagship VR headset, the Oculus Rift, according to estimates from SuperData, a gaming-focused research unit of Nielsen. Because for all the hype-filled promises, virtual reality remains, well, virtually absent from everyday American life. Photograph by Winni Wintermeyer for Fortune “It just wasn’t making sense for our company,” says CEO Mitzi Reaugh. ATTENTION DEFICIT: Despite $100 million in funding, Jaunt abandoned VR, shifting its focus to augmented reality. Time magazine put the then-22-year-old founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, on its cover and announced the technology was “about to change the world.” Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 famously said he wanted a billion people to be using Oculus headsets-though he conspicuously didn’t say by when. Venture capitalists poured billions into content development and hardware applications. Consumer tech players including Google, HTC, Samsung, and Sony joined Facebook in a race to bring consumer-ready headsets to market. That was the promise that led Facebook to pay $3 billion for headset maker Oculus VR in 2014, and every year since, evangelists have proclaimed virtual reality the next new thing. Just as movies showed viewers places they’d never go, VR would transport them directly into those same filmed environments. ![]() The vintage film comparison-think: grainy footage of silent passersby shuffling around in top hats among horse-drawn carriages and Model T–esque cars-is standard fare for virtual reality’s boosters. “There’s a moment recorded in time of Paul McCartney playing in front of people captured in a way that, maybe 100 years from now, seems like black-and-white films”-primitive but pioneering. ![]() But he still looks back at the concert video as a breakthrough achievement. Broock left Jaunt in 2016 and subsequently served a yearlong stint as a “global VR evangelist” for YouTube. The startup company quickly mobilized and recorded one of the first videos of its kind, an immersive stadium concert film that would give a viewer the sensation of being among the pulsating crowd. Broock hoped the bike’s chain clanging around the fishbowl would be ideal for something called ambisonic audio, surround sound hearable above, below, and around the listener.Ī few months later, Broock managed to show a clip of the video to McCartney, who was so impressed that he invited Jaunt to film his concert the very next night at San Francisco’s historic Candlestick Park, the same venue where the Fab Four had performed their final show 48 years earlier. In 2014, Broock offered to pay the mechanic $50 to ride around a skate park on a BMX bike while being filmed with a specialized camera rig that could shoot video and record sound in 360 degrees-all around and up and down. The unlikely union of the Beatles great, a bike-shop employee in Palo Alto, and a promising if underachieving technology is the accomplishment of Scott Broock, once an enterprising executive with a fledgling camera company called Jaunt VR.
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