This session featured a summary of market data for VR presented by Justin Hendrix of the NYC Media Lab. He started by showing the famous Gartner hype cycle chart that currently places AR near the bottom of the “Trough of Disillusionment” and VR on the “Slope of Enlightenment.” We are now in the midst of a fourth great wave that will usher in the VR/AR/MR era, having evolved through the PC to Internet and mobile revolutions already, he believes.
Hendrix then showed a market forecast from Citi Research that he joked would now be the lead slide in every VR/AR pitch as the scope of the market size is huge ($2.16 trillion by 2035 from $80 million in 2020). In the 2020-2025 timeframe, AR applications growth will be about twice as fast as VR (chart).
A second forecast from Digi-Capital sees the installed base for dedicated AR/VR/MR units rising from 25M units in 2016 to 325M units in 2020. In addition, the smartphone and tablet-installed base will rise from 4.3B to 6.8B in the same time frame – with many of these, presumably, VR compatible.
Overall, he sees five key strategies that the industry is employing today, as summarized below. Anyone interested in this space needs to be experimenting now if they want to be a player, he advised.
His key takeaway – a lot of value is going to be created and destroyed as this next era progresses.
