Virtual Derivative Reality Will Be A Trillion Dollar Market

I’m sore from playing, just maybe an hour or so every day, on my Oculus Quest 2 over the last couple weeks. This new virtual reality headset thingee from Facebook is still blowing my mind, in fact even more so since I last wrote about it a couple weeks ago. We’ve ordered our third, because my wife wants her own too.

I can’t believe that my vision for being able to look at a real-time stock portfolio and charts while listening to Spotify while watching an NFL game and streaming a Netflix documentary about Space is here already too. I found an app on Oculus that lets you run a real-time multi-screen control of a Mac or PC. It even comes with a virtual typing keypad. As you can see from low-res screen shot of my activity below, there’s a lot you can already do on this thing, and it’s like the second pitch of the first inning in The Virtual Reality Revolution.

To be clear (unlike that photo), it’s still not easy to control those screens or to type inside the Oculus headset yet in this cutting edge “Immersed” app, but you can also just tell that it’s very close to ready for primetime. Give it another year or two and I can’t imagine how many of you will be working on a daily or at least occasionally in a VR setting.

You know I’m always trying to get in front of the next, most obvious, but just burgeoning trillion dollar market place? Welcome to VR.

If you consider that Oculus is probably worth no more than maybe $20-30 billion at this moment (FB is worth $750 billion at this moment, so Oculus might account for about 5% of that value or also known as a rounding error), and KOPN and a few other pure-ish plays on VR are worth a few billion dollars, we’re talking about a market place that Wall Street has totally overlooked thus far. Facebook is now positioned to dominate this industry and unless Sony or Softee or Google or somebody big gets serious about catching up to Facebook’s critical mass lead, a lot of these VR spoils are likely to end up Facebook’s. Can Oculus’s hardware and software and, most valuably, its Oculus platform and store, generate enough value to move the needle for a 3/4 of a trillion dollar company? The answer is yes. I think the leading VR platform will easily be worth several hundred billion dollars alone.

Before I go, I have a Deep Thought for you — I took as a screen shot on my iPhone while I was livecasting the video stream of what I was seeing in my Oculus Quest Virtual Reality headset which is a real-time controllable mirror stream of what is happening on my MacBook Air and now that you’re looking a recreation of that image on your smartphone or tablet or computer screen as you read this, what you’re seeing is a derivative of reality that is like five or six levels away from reality, at least. Virtual Derivative Reality is perhaps what this working environment inside the VR headset should be called. VDR will be a trillion dollar market place within the next half decade.

I’m going to do a different kind of Live Q&A next week, where I’ll spend an hour explaining how I analyze stocks, how I find a company’s fundamentals, its sales and earnings estimates and how you can get better at analyzing individual stock’s fundamentals. We’ll do it over Zoom next Wednesday at 12pm ET. Here’s the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82792367523. No chat this week.