Will VR Ever Matter?

Daydream View, Google’s new virtual-reality headset, is made of cloth. It uses a smartphone as a screen and looks like a fancy sleeping mask. “Cozy” was the word VR chief Clay Bavor used when he showed off the system in early October, urging consumers to think about being enveloped in a YouTube video or Google Street View map. The pitch is that VR can make daily app use cooler, and that the ecosystem for all that software should run a lot like, well, Android. As Bavor described it, many companies will make headsets and phones that run Google’s VR operating system, and the company will maintain the platform and make VR versions of its most popular apps.

Google isn’t the only company trying to remake the nascent VR business in the image of one it already dominates. Two days after Bavor’s presentation, at a developer conference for Facebook’s Oculus headsets, Mark Zuckerberg spent much of his time on a demo of a VR chat room, small talk between real people via digital avatars. VR’s primary use, he said, will be computerized socializing.