Whilst there hasn’t been a major amount to get excited by in NVIDIA’s CES 2019 press conference regarding virtual reality (VR) the company did have one small cravat of information that was certainly intriguing, and that was the claim that 4 million PC VR headsets have been sold.
As normal NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was onstage to talk about what the company has planned, including the launch of the new GeForce RTX 2060. Towards the end of the event, he started to discuss several use cases for the Turing architecture inside the RTX series GPU’s, one of which was VR.
At which point he mentioned that 4 million head-mounted displays (HMDs) had been sold in the past several years, with 3800 VR titles now available on Steam. Where that 4 million figure has come from wasn’t divulged, and can only be assumed that NVIDIA has its own analytics from which the figure is based.
As that figure is purely focused on PC VR headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, this is one of the few times that an accurate size of the market can be gauged. Unlike Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) which likes to shout about its sales figures for PlayStation VR, Oculus and HTC have never released any numbers for the amount of headsets they’ve managed to shift since launch in 2016.
4 million headsets sold for what is considered an expensive niche in the videogame market seems like a good figure to VRFocus. Of course, it’s nowhere near the numbers when you look at console sales, but there’s enough for VR developers not to worry, especially if they make a cross-platform title which supports PC and console headsets.
Huang also revealed that NVIDIA has been working closely with HTC on the new VirtualLink standard, a single cable for VR headsets that combines video, audio, data and power into one neat little package.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of NVIDIA and CES 2019, reporting back with all the latest VR and augmented reality (AR) news.
