Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen stated that he believes that VR will be “like 1000 times bigger” than AR. The entrepreneur, who is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors, made the comments on his company’s bi-weekly podcast.
This is the opposite of the view stated by many tech leaders and visionaries today. As Andreessen put it: “In the Valley right now, this is a very contrarian view.”
The venture capitalist explained his reasoning by pointing out that most people’s real life surroundings aren’t particularly interesting, so the appeal of the reality they could live in VR will outweigh the advantage of overlaying content into their real world.
To be clear, Andreessen isn’t saying AR won’t be compelling. This was a statement in support of VR, not one against AR. The venture capitalist was careful to state that he believed AR “has tons of potential applications, both at work and at home”.
Full Comments
“So I’m big believers [sic] in both. I think AR has tons of potential applications, both at work and at home. […] I think VR is going to be like 1000 times bigger. In the valley right now this is a very contrarian view. Because the general theme you hear in the valley is that AR is going to be bigger than VR, and it seems like obviously AR should be bigger than VR because obviously if you can do things overlaid over the real world, that should be inherently more interesting than having to construct a synthetic world.
I just think that that’s only true for people who live in a very interesting place in the real world. […] But only something between like 0.1% and 1% of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and they’re like ‘Wow, there are so many interesting things to see’. Most people don’t live in a place like that. And so for everybody who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR are going to be inherently be much more interesting (than the physical environments). And there’s going to be a lot more of them to choose from, and so it’s going to be amazing.”
Source: a16z Podcast | Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture
