Every year San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund) releases a report on the industry as a whole, detailing the major or most influential players across a range of categories. The new 2019 VR Landscape has just been released, this time based on those who have revenue only, with over 550 companies making the cut.
While it’s positive to see that so many companies are actually generating revenue from virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the new criteria do mean a lot of new startups and indie studios haven’t mad the cut like they would have done previously.
For 2019 The VR Fund has found major growth areas to be gaming, location-based entertainment (LBE), Next Generation Reality Capture, enterprise, and healthcare. Enterprise VR has been gaining ground in a number of ways, with new dedicated hardware arriving this year in the form of Varjo VR-1, the HP Reverb Pro Edition, and most recently the HTC Vive Pro Eye which went on sale this week. On the software side, Strivr has been training over a million Walmart employees while Gravity Sketch has been helping Ford design cars with Virtualitics helping data scientists at Cedar Sinai save lives.
When it comes to consumer VR 2019 is set to be an exciting year thanks to the upcoming hardware launches for Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift S and Valve Index, while Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is still doing well with PlayStation VR having shipped 4.2 million units and even Nintendo entering the fray with the Labo VR Kit for Switch.
It’s not just big companies that are succeeding, indie developers like Beat Games are achieving notable results with Beat Saber clearing 1 million sales, SUPERHOT VR doing better than the non-VR version, and big franchises coming to headsets like Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs from Rovio Entertainment and Resolution Games (Bait!).
The VR Fund notes that over $500 million has been invested in the VR and AR ecosystems since the beginning of 2019 – although a big part of that was Magic Leap’s $280M from NTT Docomo.
It has been a positive start to the first half of the year with adoption expected to increase as the year continues. For further updates on the VR/AR industries, keep reading VRFocus.