Augmented and virtual reality market to rake moolah

Today, virtual reality and augmented reality are gaining feet in the enterprise. They have reached a point, where acceptable performance and quality of experience meets affordable pricing.  System integrators and application developers will build strong proposals by aiding digital transformation of work related activities by having a new hardware.

AR and VR to establish firm ground

According to IDC, the worldwide revenues for AR, VR market will grow to USD 162 billion in 2020.

In 2017, the revenues for VR systems, inclusive of viewers, consulting services, software and systems integration services, are predicted to be greater than AR’s revenues.  After 2017, AR revenues will escalate, hitting critical mass in healthcare delivery and product design and management-related use cases.

The recent developments in healthcare have shown the impact AR headsets can have at the industry level. According to IDC, in the next five years, other industries to benefit from AR will be education, manufacturing and logistics.

Highlighting the regional perspective, Asia-Pacific, US and Western Europe accounted for three quarters of worldwide AR and VR revenues in 2016. But the US will have an edge over the other two regions by 2020.  As AR and VR are in the nascent stages of adoption, every region is likely to see an annual growth of more than 100 percent throughout the forecast period.

In the next five years, AR and VR markets in central and Eastern Europe will flourish. The highest share of spending will be in the manufacturing and transportation verticals – mainly industrial maintenance, package delivery and logistics. Moreover, IDC forecasts that there will be vigorous growth in retail with a CAGR of 189.7 percent by 2020.

In Canada, AR and VRtechnologies, are in the early stages of adoption. The spending on VR and AR in Canada is anticipated to hit USD 500 million in 2017.

In India, approximately 50 percent of businesses will adopt AR and VR by 2017. And there will be good growth in manufacturing, retail, education and entertainment verticals. The highest adoption of AR and VR will be in entertainment.

According to Goldman Sachs Investment report, 40 percent of AR and VR revenue is going to be driven by enterprise and public sector spend and the largest revenue generating use cases will be in engineering, healthcare, and real estate.

AR and VR hardware to be in demand

Due to a high amount of market penetration, IDC reports that AR and VR devices will become cutting edge technologies for a large spectrum of industries in the near future. The market will expand to reach USD 5.54 billion in 2020, in Central and Eastern Europe.

The worldwide AR and VR headset shipments are likely to reach 76 million units by 2020, according to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. Interestingly, the economical VR devices will lead the market in terms of volume. According to the research firm, AR headsets will gather steam as more OEMs will enter the market. 

Moreover, by 2020, 61 million of VR headsets and 15 million AR headsets will be shipped by 2020, according to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker.

At the same time, the research firm states that there will be 64.8 million shipments by 2020 in VR hardware and 45.6 million shipments in AR hardware. 

AR and VR will gain ground worldwide in 2017, but it is to see if the technology will gain traction in India.