The Future of Content and What to Know About the AR/VR Trend Before You Invest

“5G will drive life-changing innovation.” — Qualcomm 2018

Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

This article is a simple investor’s guide towards innovation, a market trend analysis of the technologies involving the future of content. You are in the right place if your main objective is to investigate the market’s attitude towards augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). They are a new type of content distributed on a new type of network at incredibly fast speed. I will give you the tools to analyze the factors behind the success of some of the latest and most innovative products on the market today, fun technologies, such as 5G, game-engine powered content immersion, and real-time collaboration.

The Good News:

Companies have already invested an outstanding amount of capital in these innovations, and they continue to fuel research.

• Between 2014 and 2016, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft released their versions of the VR headset to the World, followed by many others.¹ AR/VR market is driving about $11 billion worth of revenue. The estimates from a couple of years ago are much less than the current reality. Although there’s a sense that the technology will be slow to enter the market, it will nevertheless grow into force majeure for the tech industry.²
• Stocks prices saw growth in 2019.³
• Overall, Facebook’s Oculus is leading the way. When aggregating all VR categories, Oculus is the market leader, with 26% of the overall market, as the Facebook subsidiary addresses all of the underlying categories with different products.⁴
• With prices coming down and Apple joining the dance with their iPhone, digital reality technology is expected to join the mass at a faster rate.
• It is also important to note that wearables, AR and VR are expected to change the face of education.⁵

What to Keep in mind:

• These background studies don’t show the whole picture. There needs to be a valuation of the assets coupled with a thorough comparison of the leading stocks.
• Some companies have temporarily closed their augmented reality and virtual reality departments because of a lack of support from shareholders.⁶

When I was writing this guide my goal was to establish a personalized outreach strategy by first defining a customer profile and second providing you the investor with a reliable way to access the future of content sharing, content viewing, and experiences.

The list below shows all the critical checkpoints you will have to take on your own before you invest:

1. Collect data from companies like Unity Technologies through diverse publications and through online monitoring.
2. Establish a solid strategy to pick your stocks.
3. Gather historical stock-prices data from Nasdaq and Yahoo finance as well as various relevant data that may affect the market from sources like Facebook and Google’s annual report.
4. Review the specifics of “what to consider when investing in new technologies.” ⁷
5. Do a market valuation of the current and public AR/VR products.
6. Your study may require regression models to find out how the variables affect your hypothesis. The research will influence your understanding of the value of immersive tech in the market.

“Despite the hype cooling down, it’s only a matter of time before innovations built around virtual reality and augmented reality come into being. Studies indicate that AR and VR companies will create an industry with a market value of over $160 billion.” ⁸

What to Keep in mind:

There’s a big disconnect between stock performance and innovative technology.⁹

Shareholders do not always see the value in innovation.

Conclusion

The depth of your analysis will inform whether the investments are worth the risk and more important where the new growth is coming from and how much of this future you should invest in. You and I need to remind shareholders that innovation is not a halt to rapid growth.

[1]: Leo Sun. (Jul 26 2018). Are the Virtual and Augmented Reality Markets Already Dying?
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/26/are-the-virtual-and-augmented-reality-markets-alre.aspx

[2]: James Brumley. (Feb 10 2020). Augmented Reality Stocks to Buy
https://investorplace.com/2018/06/9-augmented-reality-ar-stocks-enhance-portfolio

[3]: Tim Merel. (January 11 2017). The Reality of VR/AR Growth
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/11/the-reality-of-vrar-growth

[4]: The Motley Fool. (December 6 2018). The Virtual Reality Market Is Making a Comeback
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/the-virtual-reality-market-is-making-a-comeback-cm1065802

[5]: Dian Schaffhauser. (March 14 2018). Report Explores Potential of Wearables, AR and VR in Education
https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/03/14/report-explores-education-potential-for-wearables-ar-and-vr.aspx

[6]: Wendy Lee. (Jan 13 2019). VR gets reality check with significant decline in investment
https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-virtual-reality-investment20190113-story.html

[7] Sahil Patel. (April 2 2018). Netflix’s aggressive content-buying spree creates opportunities and risk for creators
https://digiday.com/media/netflix-content-spree-creators

[8] Admiral Markets. How and Why VR and AR Stocks Could Enhance Your Portfolio
https://admiralmarkets.com/education/articles/shares/how-and-why-vr-and-ar-stocks-could-enhance-your-portfolio

[9] Daren Fonda. (Aug 7 2018). A New Disruptive-Tech ETF Is Big on Augmented and Virtual Reality
https://www.barrons.com/articles/a-new-disruptive-tech-etf-is-big-on-augmented-and-virtual-reality-1533661637