Is the End of Moore’s Law Good for VR?

Last year I talked at Cincy Startup week about virtual reality. I used Moore’s Law as an example of virtual reality continuing to improve and those improvements will bring value to the enterprise. However, it looks like Moore’s Law is dead.

According to the winter edition of Inc. magazine, “Moore’s law is no more.” Transistors are so small now that they will invoke a “quantum uncertainty – a fuzziness that issues from the weird physics that govern at the atomic scale” which makes them unreliable.

That doesn’t mean the end for virtual reality – far from it! R&D companies have lots to gain by engineering a way out of the dilemma presented by the end of Moore’s Law. One example is developing “specialty chips for applications like virtual reality”.

Unfortunately, second wave virtual and augmented reality requires a lot of computing power. Engineers used to be able to count on the rest of the ecosystem being there to support their designs. Now though, you can build “an augmented-reality video game…but the chips might not come. So are you sure you want to build it?”

“these companies are grounded in past growth rates, so their ascendancy today says little about who will rule tomorrow.”
– Jeff Bercovici Inc.

Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft are all “outgrowths of the computing boom.” That means “these companies are grounded in past growth rates, so their ascendancy today says little about who will rule tomorrow.” I wonder if companies built on the blockchain will be the next ones to take the throne.

It won’t be an easy fight. “Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft are well positioned if the hype around virtual and augmented reality pans out.” They all expect AI to will be a major player in future innovations. Companies that want to survive the end of Moore’s law have to do more than evolve and diversify. “They’ll have to discover a new way to evolve, and perhaps a new way to be profitable…” Thankfully, we live in a world that is up to the challenge.

Featured Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash