Is it time to invest in virtual reality, or the trend is already fading? Judging by the poor devices sales development, one can suspecte that even this time VR technology (which, to be true, has been trying to figure out for at least 40 years) is bound to remain a niche phenomenon. Still many professional investors think otherwise, especially in the United States.

Boost VC: now it’s time to invest in VR

Murray Newlands, already founder of chatbot developer Chattypeople.com and of Sighted.com (an online invoicing company), interviewed on Forbes Adam Draper, founder and managing director of Boost VC accelerator (which carries among its mentors Philip Rosedale), who must know virtual reality a little bit, since he invested in 52 startups (on 180 total investments) devoted to the development of virtual reality and of augmented reality. And you know? Both agree it’s the perfect time to invest in this technology.

You must bet on people behind ideas

Draper is sure that virtual reality and augmented reality are just in their early development (that’s why 70% of the startups accelerated by Boost VC deals with such technologies, you can find their names here) and in his interview explains that in order to invest successfully you need to bet on people, on the team behind the development of a business idea, which has to be, potentially, a disruptive idea able to change the world, managed by a team able to make more right decisions than wrong decisions.

VR so far has disappointed, but it’s a good news

Because you know, I can confirm you because of my experience with SeedUp (an Italian pre-seed/seed investor): when dealing with a startup (especially if it is connected to virtual or augmented reality), you’re going to run into a long mistakes and bad decisions sequence, until you succeed. Now the sentiment towards virtual reality, being the media hype of last year deflated, is near its nadir because of disillusion, but according to Draper this is the right time to bet on it.

Startups focusing on enterprise market

Of course you can’t invest randomly: it will take time before that a billion people use virtual reality on a daily basis. Untill then, winnig startups have to focuse on providing “enterprise” solutions, starting to create an habit, to make someone’s life better (it doesn’t matter if they will be coders who will have the possibility to visualize code in VR or athlets who will be exercising in virtual gyms), and then turning into a powerful reason for use. This was the case, for example, of the use of spreasheeds like Excel, that from a mere personal utility software used by companies turned into one of the reasons why people buy personal computers.

Google goes shopping to develop new products

The idea that this could be the perfect time to invest has just come to mind in Google too, since the Us giant just bought for 1.1 billion dollars a “team of Htc talent” already working on the Htc Google Pixel smartphone, as stated Rick Osterloh, Google Senior Vice President Hardware (i.e. in charge of the development of products like Google Home, Google Wifi, Daydream View, Chromecast Ultra and the Pixel itself).

Google, next October 4, will launch a new products generation and who knows if among them there will be some new headsets for virtual reality or augmented reality: if not this time, it sounds likely in the near future. If you wanna know how this will end, continue to follow Mondivirtuali.it, even through our account on Twitter and our fanpage on Facebook (but remember: Mondivirtuali is also on Flickr, on Pinterest, on Scoop.it, on Paper.li and also on Youtube).