According to figures released by ABI Research, the rate of adoption of virtual reality (VR) will continue to increase over the next few years, gaining up to 256 million users worldwide by 2022, generating revenues of over $60 billion (USD) by that year.
The report indicates that much of the expected user base will be made up of consumers, who will also be accounting for most of the revenue generated, though enterprise and commercial use is expected to expand its market share to over 40% by 2022, a significant rise from the 26% of market share as of 2015.
“Content availability remains an issue, but healthy strides were made in the past year, particularly in Asia-Pacific and China with location based VR. Further trials and launches will accelerate the adoption of immersive content across the market and expand the use of VR as a tool for training, design, preparatory work and planning,” says Michael Inouye, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. “While the consumer space often garners the largest share of attention the market potential is much wider and we’ve already seen very promising interest in verticals like Retail, Healthcare, Automotive, Education, and Real Estate /Architecture / Engineering / Construction.”
The report further predicts that the rise of standalone VR and 6DoF mobile VR will help narrow the currently large gap between high-end location-based VR experiences and mobile head-mounted displays (HMDs) such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream.
Sam Rosen, Managing Director and VP at ABI Research, concluded, “We continue to view VR as a long-term market proposition, a technology that will really start to show its true transformative capabilities five plus years from now. In addition, while we currently see clear delineations between AR and VR today and into the near future. We expect these lines of demarcation to begin fading as the technologies increasingly reach maturity and saturation, perhaps then becoming better suited to the mixed and merged reality monikers that some use today.”
VRFocus will continue to report on developments within the VR industry.