The Virtual Reality ecosystem features a plethora of interacting trends that present a complex ongoing story. A market that has been dominated early on by consumer adoption in gaming and video is beginning to give way to promising enterprise ventures. Hardware updates from major players like Facebook (Oculus) and HTC are on the horizon, with trials around simulation and training for employees beginning to prove ROI. The consumer market still dominates in terms of shipments and overall activity, but many of the trends seen in the consumer space also carry over to enterprise, with easy to use standalone VR headsets increasing in popularity chief among them. The importance of content cannot be understated, and improvements in development tools over the past year have been met with both an increase in hardware capability but also greater ecosystem fragmentation.
This report presents the newest ABI Research quantitative and qualitative data around these topics to present a well-rounded, end to end market update. This includes the total number of hardware shipments and value chain revenues per vertical until 2023, including tethered, standalone, and mobile reliant VR HMDs, enterprise and consumer software and content, and connectivity, among other areas. Further qualitative information regarding 6 to 24 month opportunities, recommendations, and current threats in the market are included to guide and inform conversation for the current market and through the next 5 years. This includes shifts in adoption towards standalone devices, enterprise VR adoption and enterprise friendly use cases like simulation and training, and the impact of new connectivity technologies such as 5G on all of these areas. Also included are company profiles and case studies that are worthy of attention, either due to ongoing impact to the market or upcoming potential.