It sure seems so, based on
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:[W]orldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) market will grow from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 billion in 2020... Sales of AR/VR hardware will generate more than 50% of worldwide revenues throughout the forecast period.
This $162 billion figure has been widely reported everywhere, but
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, no one I know has run the back-of-envelope calculations on this figure. But since IDC's report says over half this $162B revenue is from VR/AR hardware devices, that's $81 billion. And if we divide that by $350 per individual device sale at retail -- averaging the price of premium devices like Vive and low-end smartphone add-ons -- we get well over 225 million. (And that's estimating downward.)I've asked the report's lead author, Christopher Chute, if my assumption is correct, because 225 million devices sold in such a short time is a massive market:
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For a couple comparison points, only one videogame console, the Playstation 2, has anywhere near that install base, and that took over a decade, while the latest videogame consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One,
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total in the last 3 years.A couple even more relevant data points: It took the iPhone
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, and that's, you know, a fricking phone. And right now, in 2016, if we're to include[To see links please register here]
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, and the under 1 million sales of both Vive and Oculus Rift, we're well under 20 million VR devices on the market total so far. So with this IDC number, we're talking 10x growth in under 5 years. Which I guess is possible, but when people start talking about adoption rates comparable with the iPhone, I'd say it's time to start scrutinizing these estimates much closer.Please share this post:
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