Virtual reality (VR) has always been like a dream that is ready to turn the corner but somehow didn’t reach its full potential. There’s a visible difference in people’s perception of VR now.
Several advances in hardware including processors and headsets have increased the power of VR. It now produces realistic VR experiences, which signify that VR is now a cheap and powerful technology that is ready to go mainstream.
Facebook, Sony, and HTC offer powerful VR headsets to the market today. Microsoft, Google, and Apple deliver high-tech augmented reality AR devices such as Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens 2, and the iPhone 12 Pro smartphone.
The VR market is keeping pace with hardware advances. MarketsAndMarkets, a reputed research firm, has been forecasting a virtual reality industry growth of $20.9 billion by 2025 from what was $6.1 billion In 2020.
The VR market, on the whole, is set to explode beyond $100 billion By 2026 with an enviable CAGR of 51.1%.
- Ecosystem participants currently monetize VR with hardware, devices, software, content, and services
- Business revenue opportunities in VR with high growth potential include VR data and analytics, VR payments, and VR pay per experience
- VR monetization will take the route of mixed reality, as physical objects appearing in the virtual world give us a sense of permanency, as you begin to feel physical objects really exist inside the virtual world
- The VR market is set to reach $23.2 billion by 2026 in the United States, mainly because of VR devices sales
- Global sales of VR gesture sensing devices is set to reach $11.4 billion across the globe by 2026 with an enviable CAGR of 53.3%
Advanced Hardware Capabilities Make It Easier To Build Brands
Brands Succeed In Integrating VR And AR Into Promotional Campaigns
Brands use virtual reality and augmented reality to create experiences that are more personalized and targeted toward their customers. They are able to collect real-time data and increase their brand awareness at the same time.
One survey indicated that a brand that is ready to sponsor VR experiences has a 53% chance of getting more respondents who are ready to buy its products. The survey also showed that a brand that sponsors a virtual reality experience has a 62% chance of getting respondents to engage with it.
Many tech companies use immersive experiences with great success in connection with sales experience and brand messaging and inundating consumers with objects and branded content, both passively and actively.
For example, IKEA released IKEA Place which allowed customers to arrange furniture that they chose from the IKEA catalog across different rooms in their homes. Topshop launched the Kinect fitting room that allowed shoppers to try out clothing items in a virtual fitting room.
Patron was another VR company that launched its virtual reality experience called the Art of Patron, which allows customers to take a personal tour of the Hacienda distillery.
Top Virtual Reality Hardware Companies In The United States, North America
Christie Digital
Based in Cypress, California, Christie Digital is a specialist in audiovisual systems and products such as advanced visualization and 3-D projection. It has a huge presence in sectors like engineering, automotive, energy, transportation, architecture, museum, construction, sciences, government, and medical education.
ScienceSoft USA Corporation
Located in McKinney, Texas, ScienceSoft USA Corp is a software development services and IT consulting firm that specializes in ERP, data analytics, DMS, CRM, information security, e-commerce, and other fields of innovation like the Internet of Things, augmented and virtual reality, big data, computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Immersion Medical
Manufacturing haptic effects design software, and haptic effects, Immersion Medical, which is located in San Jose, California, also offers IP licensing, engineering, and design services.
Sensics, Inc.
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Sensics is into manufacturing hardware components and virtual reality devices. It also offers an open-source VR platform and other software, VR equipment for military and public installations, and custom design and development.
Viotek
This company is based in South Bend, Indiana. Viotek offers several hardware products like virtual reality headsets, wireless chargers, mobile accessories, computer accessories, whiteboards, car seat cushions, and curved monitors.
World Viz
Based in Santa Barbara, California, World Viz is a provider of virtual reality hardware and software. Its offerings include rigs, projections, integrated systems, VR creation software, and tracking cameras. Other offerings include training services, hardware installation, and integration, and hardware and software custom design and development.
VRmagic
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, VRmagic is a hardware manufacturing company that produces virtual reality medical simulators, imaging components for quality assurance and industrial automation, and cameras.
Inertial Labs
This is a company that is based in Paeonian Springs in Virginia and provides attitude and heading reference systems, motion capture systems, GPS-aided inertial navigation systems, motion reference units, and orientation sensors. These hardware systems and accessories find applications in military training using augmented and virtual reality, industrial applications, and aerospace.
PocketCake
Headquartered in Blue Springs, Missouri, PocketCake is a specialist in virtual reality simulation, mobile virtual reality games, and apps. The company offers several VR applications in education, architecture, law, medicine, military training, police, firefighting, and engineering.
Serious Simulations
The company is based in Orlando, Florida. Serious Simulations specializes in providing military training, VR training simulations, emergency services, industrial and commercial uses. Gas, oil, and power generation are some of their industrial uses.
Positron
Based in Glendale, California, Positron offers several hardware products and services including motion simulator rides, holograms, software & systems engineering, interactive displays, brand gamification, design, consulting, media production, and VR experiences.
Global Providers Of Virtual Reality Software And Hardware
Oculus
Based in Menlo Park, California, Oculus VR is a subsidiary of Facebook that offers virtual reality headsets, hardware, and accessories for consumer and commercial users. This VR company also provides art software including augmented reality software and educational virtual reality software.
This is a giant company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Google is a specialist in development tools and has produced VR headsets and cameras. The company also developed software and virtual reality programs.
Samsung
Based in South Korea, Samsung is a tech giant and a well-known manufacturer of virtual reality headsets like the Samsung Gear VR and accessories, and broadcasters/recorders. The company also offers other consumer products like computers, appliances, TVs, and cell phones.
Bricks & Goggles
The company specializes in using 3D files to create VR simulations for construction designs. Based in the Netherlands, Bricks & Goggles offers several options for commercial users such as moving elements, the addition of physical or real-world objects, and free-roaming navigation. The company’s offerings have several applications in interior design, architecture, real estate, and construction.
Marxent Labs
This company offers visualization and 3-D design products. Located in Kettering, Ohio, Marxent labs has several offerings including a 3-D cloud platform with view/design in room augmented reality, e-commerce virtual reality product visualization, 3-D room designer, and a VR showroom.
Unity Technologies
Based in San Francisco, California, Unity Technologies provides development platforms, and game creation software using augmented and virtual reality and other technologies.
Snap, Inc.
Based in Santa Monica, California, Snap is the creator of the mobile application, Snapchat, and offers augmented reality solutions including the addition of 3D virtual objects and filters for Snapchat.
Firsthand Technology
This company is located in Seattle, Washington, and specializes in medical therapy virtual reality technology. Firsthand Technology offers hardware and software subscriptions for pain relief. The company also offers hardware like headsets, sensors, hospital-grade carts, touchscreen monitors, mobility products, computers, and controls.
Retinad Analytics
This company offers behavior data analytics for augmented and virtual reality use. Some of the Retinad Analytics applications include audience and content testing, storyboarding, audience targeting, and visualization.
VR Vision Inc.
Based in Toronto, Canada, this virtual reality company provides innovative, impactful, and immersive experiences with virtual reality technology. VR Vision Inc. offers complete turnkey solutions and custom-developed virtual reality applications by deploying hardware as an authorized ISV Oculus Partner, Pico Interactive, and HTC Vive reseller.
How To Operate VR Equipment
Your staff operates your VR equipment for you based on the kind of arena you have:
- VR equipment that you run like a VR escape room or VR arcade.
- VR equipment used by your clients. In this case, your customers use your premises on rent for VR events.
The VR gear could be yours or theirs depending on their familiarity and choice of the top 5 VR gear providers.
Operating And Troubleshooting With VR
Resolve Crisis Situations With Established Troubleshooting Techniques
It’s important that your staff members are well versed with troubleshooting methods connected with a software or hardware issue. Staff members must handle crisis situations like a medical emergency or a power cut.
VR Equipment Maintenance & Cleaning
Clean headsets and other VR hardware after every use, as hygiene is of paramount importance in light of virus infection spread through the coronavirus pandemic.
Train your staff to follow a cleaning regimen. Your VR hardware, especially the headsets, will need to be cleaned after every use. Proper hygiene is absolutely critical.
What hardware is required for virtual reality?
The headset is typically the most important piece of a virtual reality hardware kit that businesses require.
This device looks like a pair of goggles that you wear over your eyes. High-end quality headsets run games and apps through your computer.
Two high-resolution LCD monitors or OLEDs are included in a virtual reality headset. These provide separate images to create stereoscopic graphics in each eye.
The result is a 3D virtual world including head-tracking capability with six degrees of movement (6DOF) and a binaural audio system.
How does VR hardware work?
Accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes are sensors that make 6DOF work. In the case of a Sony PlayStation VR headset, LEDs are placed externally that identify the position of your head in VR using an external camera.
What is an example of a virtual reality based device?
Headsets like the PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive are being used for VR gaming since 2010. Samsung Gear VR is a typical example of a phone-based hardware device.
What hardware does virtual reality use?
There are two critical components required for virtual reality including a CPU equivalent to an i5-4590 and a graphics card equivalent to the NVIDIA GTX 1070. The RX 5600 XT and RTX 2060 are model GPU equivalents that are slightly faster than the earlier mentioned components.
How popular is VR in 2021?
Hardware is the key to VR’s popularity. VR heavyweights are now manufacturing handsets that are appreciably more powerful yet cheaper than earlier models that were available in the market a couple of years ago.
Investment in VR vision and innovation initiatives are driving sales, as a result, with the increasing consumer demand for headsets. VR companies are using new designs and techniques to come up with next-generation VR hardware that is light, yet powerful enough to literally transform one’s daily life.
VR Improves With Improved Hardware
Virtual reality based device
Research conducted by Statista shows that Facebook, Sony, and HTC are the top three players in the market for VR headsets. Research data provided by SuperData show that 5.7 million VR headsets were delivered in 2019.
VR systems sold commercially in 2016 made users connect to sensors, controllers, and a headset that were together linked to an external high-end computer. This was an inconvenient setup that was bulky and expensive.
Oculus Quest 2 Makes It Easier
The situation is more convenient today. Facebook has released Oculus Quest 2 which does not require an external computer, as these all-in-one VR platforms have their own built-in processors. Bill Myers, who is S3 Technologies’ director of emerging technology believes this is a giant leap forward, as compared to what was available a few years ago.
Myers had a VR arcade back in 2017 that enabled consumers to access sophisticated VR stations. A high-end computer was used with an HTC Vive headset for each station, which cost $2,500 back then. However, consumers can now access these VR stations without the use of a high-end computer.
A combination of consumer readiness issues and technology gaps earlier hindered the progress of VR. The virtual reality market is now poised for substantial global growth offering opportunities in different forms to ecosystem component providers, content creators and developers, and service providers.
Lower Broadband Costs To Spur VR Growth
As broadband costs come down, VR will experience a high growth phase in about two years’ time. Greater user acceptance and wired and wireless connections as a whole will be evident in both the business market and consumer segments.
Virtual reality latency will be significantly lower in the future with substantial bandwidth provided by 5G. The 5G applications market was earlier encumbered due to a combination of consumer readiness issues and technology gaps.
Increased Hardware Capabilities Will Produce Fully Immersive Experiences
Now, the 5G applications market in VR is set for tremendous growth with new immersive apps coming into the market. This provides new opportunities for ecosystem component providers, service providers, and content developers.
The VR market will be fully transformed by 5G with the development of gigabit ethernet fiber. Capabilities will increase in VR and augmented reality applications allowing you to gather a fully immersive experience with increased capabilities. Sizeable portions of VAS applications are likely to turn into next-generation, ultra-high-definition, voice-enabled apps like virtual reality.
A variety of enterprise purposes in several industries including supporting customers, managing internal operations and supply chains will influence the virtual reality market and other technologies like the mixed reality market.
Some of the important industry verticals will be public safety, training, education, automotive, and real estate management. Simulations, instruction, training, and education are likely to be included in the leading sector.
New Apps For VR Consumer Market To Experience Realism
Entertainment and lifestyle enhancements will lead the way for the consumer virtual reality market in the future. VR-enabled gaming will lead the way in entertainment, while the latter segment will be flooded with a battering of new apps like Virtual Location Experiences where people assemble in groups to fill in the cyber world.
Imagine watching your favorite football team in a virtual stadium or getting involved in virtual alumni events. You will be exposed to examples about everything and experience sounds and sights that appear real.
You can also experience the smells and feelings of game day. You’ll experience realism in a whole new way as random events take place in a given experience powered by AI advancements that are likely to influence the VR market.
Virtual Reality To Help Train Employees
The publisher feels training and simulations will lead the way in industrial and enterprise virtual reality market segments. From familiar expectations like VR-enhanced simulations for vehicle and flight training to everything connected with situational training like employees learning how to deal with robberies. This is what Verizon did with the use of Striver.
Employees will be tested with VR in an artificial environment. Reality business ideas will flourish. Businesses will use it as a means to create a virtual experience of daily work and then throw random events into the mix, both to add amusement/interest as well as to prepare them for a real-world experience where they had to confront an aging shoplifter.
Facebook’s Augmented Reality Glasses To be Personal Glasses Of The Future
Augmented Reality Glasses
Facebook’s investment in virtual reality shows that it is not depending on its ownership of Oculus for the future. This social media giant is working on developing new augmented reality glasses which has been confirmed by TechCrunch.
Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook‘s head of augmented reality, was of course enthusiastic about it and confirmed to TechCrunch that the company was building hardware products. Facebook is keen on playing its part and making augmented reality glasses a reality, and the company is going the extra mile to make sure its vision becomes a reality.
The company is excited about this vision, but there’s been a series of security breaches that have brought this under fire. Millions of Facebook users face the risk of exposing their personal information. The company’s first hardware device developed in-house called Portal entered the market under the Facebook name.
As the probability of personal information breach increased, Portal started receiving a lukewarm or chilly reception by the tech world. It would be a big ask for people to try out a Facebook camera that openly advertises it has the ability to track a user located anywhere in a room inside the home. The company already has a shoddy record of dealing with such issues in the past.
Augmented reality glasses will intrude into your life by offering you a more personal lens than the one that was earlier released. Facebook has a task on their hands and will have to work towards creating a sort of trust needed to realize this prestigious project, assuming the technology reaches a point where it becomes viable to manufacture a consumer product.
Facebook has set itself a goal of developing augmented reality glasses for quite some time now. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has spoken about AR being the ultimate endpoint at the F8 conference it held in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has already spoken of the company’s VR effort taking place currently and considers AR as the ultimate endpoint for this endeavor.
The form factor is likely to diminish in size over a period of 10 years, but these glasses will also start looking like normal glasses through which people can get into both augmented and virtual reality. It’s worth noting that augmented reality not just gives a user the ability to roam the world but also the chance to overlay artificially created digital objects on top of this virtual world.
The way to understand this is that today you can pull out a friend’s photo that’s uploaded to your phone. This would be a small photo version. However, in the future, you could just produce a photo by snapping your fingers and making it to the appropriate size with the help of your AR glasses.
Other people can see this as well. As a matter of fact, when this world finally arrives, physical objects and a lot of other things like a TV that we used to display an image will turn into $1 apps that we download from an AR app store. It’s a vision that will take a lot of work to make it happen, but that is the goal that Facebook has set upon itself to accomplish over the next 10 years.
There is some doubt about whether Facebook is developing seamless AR glasses at the moment, the kind that Zuckerberg describes. There is still a long way to go, and as by Facebook’s timetable, the company has eight long years to accomplish this goal.
