Virtual glasses shipments to reach 100 million by 2021
The International Data Corporation (IDC) has been publishing reports related to Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies for quite some time now, but a recent publication from the company shows us how these technologies are seen as completely viable in the near future.
The new report predicts that there will be a substantial increase (10 times higher than today) in shipments of virtual glasses and other hardware related to virtual and augmented reality within the next 4 years. All this because there will already be a number of new devices and accessories on the market for users. Ramon Llamas, research manager of IDC’s Virtual and Augmented Reality team pointed out that 2016 marked an important step for the VR and AR glasses market as the hardware had finally reached the hands and heads of consumers. He further mentioned that there was a clear demand coming mainly from tech enthusiasts, something that was really evident as companies were targeting the product to users and developers handling video game and multimedia content consumption. Llamas expressed that this would set the stage for the many aspects of the market that device manufacturers, platform and content providers, and developers would address in the months and years to come. While the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR have heavily dominated the market so far, there are a host of companies looking to enter this world now that the technology is more and better developed.
Companies like LG have already had their say on this technology because of products like HTC’s Vive, and Microsoft is about to launch their new affordable line of virtual reality goggles along with Acer, ASUS, Dell, Lenovo and HP. With all this new hardware, it is estimated that there will be a huge increase in terms of VR and AR goggle shipments as people are finally starting to become truly interested in these technologies thanks to all the new high quality software that companies and developers are producing.
The International Data Corporation highlighted that although they had pooled data from both technologies in their report, Augmented Reality currently has a minority share of the market, suggesting that it is worth around $210 million to Virtual Reality’s almost $2.1 billion. However, the firm believes this fact will change massively over the next few years, as its forecast shows AR will have a huge boost from the next year, increasing in popularity almost exponentially from that point onwards, estimating that its value will grow from the nearly $210 million to $48.7 billion in four years, while VR will grow from $2.1 billion to $18.6 billion by 2021.
It is often said that Augmented Reality will gradually displace Virtual Reality and this report seems to predict just that fact. Since this technology is much more useful in terms of work and sense of productivity, it is likely to make its way into the job market, which will help revolutionize the way we do daily tasks. For these reasons, at Two Reality we promote the creative and commercial growth of this industry, helping companies to produce cutting-edge Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences through the development of software for virtual glasses in Spain. Although the International Data Corporation is an American organization that specializes in market research and has a strong track record of correct predictions behind it, we should take the data offered in the report with some caution. The numbers they manage are quite optimistic for the Virtual and Augmented Reality market, but we should remember that the same IDC predicted in 2011 that by 2015 Microsoft’s new (at that time) Windows Phone platform would overtake Apple’s iOS operating system in the mobile market.
