Quick Take: Why Twitter Is Moving Into The Increasingly Congested VR Space

Twitter have hired former Apple designer Alessandro Sabatelli to oversee the company’s Virtual and Augmented Reality teams, a position Sabatelli claims is to ‘empower us all in the spatial computing revolution’. Though unlikely to see Twitter challenging the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive in VR markets such as Gaming or Film production, the move presents a positive turn for a company in arguably the best position to serve a presently undervalued aspect of VR.

As MIDiA Research will be discussing in our forthcoming report on the VR industry, VR’s huge investment in the past 5 years is heavily weighted towards hardware development with comparatively little on content. Still problematic is what is invested in content is focused heavily on Gaming and Entertainment, and much less on other potential VR markets such as Health Care and Real Estate.

Here lies the opportunity for Twitter: Investment in VR news content is presently low. Now is the time to acknowledge that Twitter has always functioned best as an instant news source, a place where a story breaks from the people who have seen it first hand before then proliferating into wider society, This immediacy remains its strength and was arguably the biggest revolution in news coverage since Ted Turner’s CNN brought 24 news to the masses - representing a sharp contrast from the pre-packaged and composed form of print journalism. With developments such as Next VR’s innovations in live Virtual Reality, Twitter has both the reach and recognition to position itself as the first point of call for news in VR.