Marketing focus for VR-based 3D designing

Exploring the key focus for finding markets for VR-based 3D designing.

Two questions:

1. Is I/O performance the correct “key” selling point for VR designing? Historically, in the short term, a disruptive performance gain doesn’t always work as the main selling point.
2. Does Freebird’s target market already consider performance to be a crucial factor?

Rationale:

1. The early successful Solid State Drive markets seem to be due to form-factor, power usage, and mechanical resilience. Seismic devices, cameras, netbooks etc. I/O performance doesn’t seem to be the main factor driving their adoption. They were used for performance in some industries, like supercomputers and Silicon Graphics workstations, but they didn’t become the dominant storage choice in those industries, because hard disks still offered a lot (lot) more storage capacity.

The parallel I’m drawing here is, speed of input/output with VR is 10x faster than traditional 3D modeling, but I wonder whether I/O speed advantage should be the main search criteria while looking for markets to sell successfully in.

2. This isn’t a rule. There are other markets where performance was the key adoption factor. For e.g. 3D graphics accelerators, for better gaming experience. But these were also markets where increasing performance was an active goal of the content creators, and the desire to consume 10x better quality content convinced consumers to purchase these cards (creating a virtuous cycle). The accelerators enabled creators to create 10x better quality content, and they were already in a culture of maximizing performance. So an accelerator probably resonated with them, as performance was a core value for them since the beginning, and a 10x jump in performance enabled them to build things they wanted to (but couldn’t previously). Obviously this is over-simplifying and fabricating a neat narrative.. but there is some truth to this. So the second question is, are Freebird’s target customers already performance-oriented?

Current state:

Right now, the marketing plan seems to be around finding people who need to do creative modeling frequently, and selling Freebird to them as having faster I/O performance for creative modeling. Both of these search criteria derive from faster I/O performance, since the performance enables 10x more creative exploration. So in essence, the current marketing plan is I/O performance-centric. Is that the correct plan?

Misc:

What are the other characteristics of VR designing (like form factor, power usage, and mechanical resilience were for SSDs)?

A VR designing system costs similar to a mid-range desktop monitor for professionals (in the US), and is significantly cheaper than a full desktop or laptop. So for new designers without a PC, this could be their main way to design in 3D. It is actually a fairly powerful mobile device for a very cheap price (compared to similarly powerful smartphones).