Because no one will really do the stuff you suggest. All the things you describe just take too much effort to make
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
You can already very easily animate an assembly in modern CAD programs by setting up connectors and constraints, which you normally do as a matter of course anyway. There's literally nothing to do, you just click on the "assembly" tab and start dragging parts around.
Yes, in the same way as you can trivially restyle a Word document with a few clicks around the Style section of the ribbon - making it easy to adjust for the demands of your publisher, or to the new corporate color scheme.
That is, it's trivial if you carefully followed the best practices, did everything correctly at every step to make sure the internal representation is semantically correct and complete - and not bashed stuff around, copying and pasting and dragging by hand, until it looked okay-ish on the screen, like everyone else does.
But if you want to publish something that will be visible to the public, you can't just export the default output from your CAD app. You want something that fits with your brand's aesthetic/guidelines, that looks professional, that clearly communicates without distraction. These things require consideration. Look at an IKEA diagram—they are carefully designed to make assembly as obvious as possible to a layperson; animations are invariably slower to produce than a static print diagram.
3D scanning only gets you a mesh, it doesn't get you interactivity or functionality. If you just want to manhandle a bunch of meshes, modding H3 VR is easy, and there's a 3D modelling program for SteamVR that opens and edits meshes just fine.
Hell, you can even interactively edit things in the Unreal IDE. But it's still a serious task.
Sure, but it's a very useful first step. When you want to do something like, say, 3D printing a case for your bluetooth earbuds, there is no approach that isn't tedious.
> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones
> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.
Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.
I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.
Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.
And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
I think they do in the context of “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones” and comparing them to a market that includes self-published books.
IMO self-published books would be better compared to self-published movies (which isn’t what the original commenter said, but they were just too obviously wrong).
So this would include things like YouTube videos, Twitch, etc, but not a private wedding video that doesn’t get published.
> And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
When I talk about “material shot by amateurs with their phones” I was referring to independent very low budget movies, the modern version of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, not videos shot by people at parties, they do not classify as movies IMO.
Should we also include in the book category people's personal diaries, internal companies documents, sportsbooks, wedding picture books, school yearbooks, etc.?
Yes but what's your point? The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger. The video game market is much larger than both combined.
Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.
> The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger
Only for a handful of titles though.
Most movies lose money, they sell very little if not nothing at all.
Most books don't sell as well, but it costed a very tiny fraction of the cost of a movie production to publish them.
It's mostly a single person in their homes in their spare time.
> Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products pay off despite the initial expense
The initial point was that most can't afford the more complicated products, but can still produce useful low tech manuals. It's doubtful that the high tech version of the manual would drive more sales, because the product in this case is not the manual, but the furniture (or whatever else).
The AR/VR manual could cost more than the actual product to make.
The politics of this are interesting. 3D movie and game content restores some of the exclusivity lost by amateur/phone content.
I'm not convinced that's a good bet. YouTube and especially TikTok exploded by going in the opposite direction.
But it's a move that could integrate Apple's movie and audio software, high end hardware (Studio and Pro), content studio ambitions, and now Vision Pro as a consumption device.
There's a lot more money in lowering the cost of entry to a new ecosystem than raising it. That's how the App Store exploded and drove iPhone sales, and how Amazon has a unicorn business just from self-publishing.
Going for the high end can work too, as long as the content and product are good enough. But it's a much tougher challenge.
if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.
Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.
Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.
But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too
By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion
The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.
Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.
Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness