Entertainment companies, particularly those that rent out high-end VR gear, have seen a big increase in interest as people search for new ways to connect. Trend Explained: Virtual Reality, Before and After CoronavirusConsumers have adopted all kinds of new behaviours during the shutdown, including Zoom happy hours, virtual games nights, Netflix parties, online learning and working from home – and VR is well placed to serve this new market. Up until now, according to tech consulting firm Omdia, global consumers own just 26 million VR headsets – and many of these are gathering dust. As the world went into lockdown, there was a big uptick in demand for VR applications. Surveys show that businesses are adopting VR at twice the rate of consumers.By and large, the consumer VR industry suffered from a familiar chicken-and-egg problem. All this means we can provide a meaningful and useful user experience that goes beyond the tempting but often distracting bells and whistles. And not all of these solutions require a headset. The Chinese government has plans to grow a domestic VR industry, creating key patents and industry standards that would make Chinese VR companies globally competitive by 2025.In 2014, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey predicted that virtual reality was, “going to change the world.” Fast forward six years, and virtual reality seems to have failed to take the consumer world by storm. Although most people who try high-end VR headsets end up being blown away by the experience, this enthusiasm has not yet translated into major sales. When we started looking at VR pretty much all we knew was that we wanted to build a fully interactive experience, that we did not want to user to have to take off their headset to change to another video or to fiddle around with the settings. The industry may not have helped itself by promoting clunky, low-end products that paired with smartphones, like the free Google Cardboard. Fast forward six years, and virtual reality seems to have failed to take the consumer world by storm. The high-quality headsets were too expensive for most consumers and without a large customer base, content developers were not motivated to produce applications. August 2016. In March 2019, Sony announced it had sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR (PSVR) headsets, while in April, Nintendo released a low-tech VR set for use with the Nintendo Switch.Yet, while apps and headsets for the entertainment sector may get the most attention, the real area of growth is in enterprise applications. And the result is a much more immersive experience for the viewer, unlike anything previously available.The result with our Project Himalaya is a controller-less user interface, full interactivity within the experience, a content-centric layout, and a couch-friendly virtual space. Policy support from Beijing, along with the rollout of 5G networks, means that the market for VR in China could soon outstrip that in the west.The coronavirus pandemic may also provide a boost for VR. Investments into VR technology have been immense over the past three years, with all the major tech companies committing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions to the future immersive experience.
Virtual reality is an emerging technology that could provide the answer. Virtual Reality is undoubtedly an exciting prospect right now.
At Accedo, our innovations team has been working on a Virtual Reality project to enable users to interact with content and menu choices within a VR headset. Compared to gaming, there is a much more limited need for interaction, meaning getting the right content is achievable. Yet that is not the full story, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology expects to see the compound annual growth rate of the VR market reach 91.2 per cent in the next few years.