Future Watch: Sky Steps Up Its VR Game. What It Means For Indie Authors.

One of the biggest transformations we’ll see as this decade closes and the era of 5G and the Internet of Things arrives is Virtual Reality.

Virtual Reality (VT) and its cousin Augmented Reality (AR) have been slowly moving from science fiction to science fact for a good few years now, driven by the games industry.

We’ve seen token gestures towards the future, most famously with the VR documentary shown at the premiere of the final Hobbit movie, and I’ve reported here recently on AR books.

But with Sky’s announcement of a dedicated VR production studio (LINK) VR moves firmly into mainstream media.

The tipping point has been improvements in quality, affordability and availability of the headgear required to make VR consumption an experience worth paying a premium for.

The next step is to produce content worth paying for, and that’s where we authors, in time, will be presented with opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities? Expect children’s books, adult erotica and documentary books like cookery and educational titles to become early runners.

No, we don’t have to do crash-courses in VR-scripting to get in on the act. We just need to be pro-active, follow developments, cast our net wide and build contacts who might, for profit-share or as a freelance paid job, do all that for us.

VR/AR is just another sub-licensing opportunity unfolding.

In time it will be another major distraction for consumers who might otherwise by buying and reading our books.

But it will also bring promotional and retail opportunities.

Back in 2011 I sketched a VR future where instead of looking at flat-screen pages of books and having to jump from page to page each time, we could walk around a virtual book-store, see hundreds of books lined up on shelves just like in a book store, step away and be in a different section discovering new books, and be able to pick them up, read them and engage with them, just like in a real book store.

Imagine a full-size box-store in your living room where you can stroll the aisles, select a dozen books and pile them up, then grab a virtual coffee at the virtual coffee bar and sit and flip through each title as if turning real pages, and decide which you want to buy.

And then, having downloaded the title, take it to bed with you and virtual-read it as a book, turning virtually-real pages with your absolutely real fingers, highlighting passages with a virtually-real pen, dog-earing virtually-real pages and, if you’re of the crazed mentality of one patron of my local library a few years ago, rip-out the virtual-last page so the next poor sucker won’t find out how the story ends.

If Amazon (the player most able to afford to make it happen) hasn’t got a VR book store by 2020 I shall be very surprised.

And if that VR book store isn’t replete with VR and AR books I shall be even more surprised.

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The International Indie Author
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