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This can't possibly just be a hardware play. This investment would buy 1.3 million Oculus Rifts at retail price. At component prices and figuring economies of

This can't possibly just be a hardware play. This investment would buy 1.3 million Oculus Rifts at retail price. At component prices and figuring economies of scale lets say it could fund the construction of perhaps 5 million units. Are there really 5 million people waiting to buy an AR device? Google Glass sold perhaps 50,000 units--has the market somehow grown by a factor of 100x in the past couple of years? I just don't see enough people wanting to own this tech. Not now, not even in 10 years. The more likely possibility in my mind is media (this becomes the thing that replaces 3D movies or 3D TV) where they collect a royalty on everyones content, or perhaps theme parks (they are in Florida after all). A Hogwarts where you could actually see the spells you cast, or an Imagineered experience where you could walk through Mary Poppins' animated countryside might be capable of generating enough revenue to justify this.

NegatioN 11y ago
I agree with much of what you're saying. However I'm not sure your comparison with Google Glass is fitting. The market for a functional Google Glass might also have been a lot bigger than 50 000. Not a lot of people outside the tech-environment knew a whole lot about it, and there weren't really an eco-system around it since it was never a consumer-grade product. So I think the market is bigger than previous numbers indicate, however I'm not sure how close to perfection it would need to be to show it's true colors. Hopefully the launch of Oculus and Vive might give us an indicator this year. (As an anecdote,) personally I would want something like this if it actually had enough content to let me reuse the product without indefinitelly replaying tech-demos. :)