Report: XR Industry Insight 2019–2020

A new report published by VR Intelligence features insight from Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Intel, Nvidia and More

As the extended reality (XR) market matures, it appears to have reached a tipping point. Divergences in successful use cases are starting to make themselves evident, and questions have lingered around everything from consumer awareness and content availability to technology adoption, costs and ergonomics. While many of these questions are progressively being addressed and the sector is picking up momentum, VR Intelligence spoke to over 750 professionals working in and around XR to find out the state of XR today, and how the sector might evolve in the near to longer-term.

Our survey finds strong evidence that XR is establishing itself quickly and strongly in supporting enterprise but still struggling to gain a major foothold for consumers: almost half (49.2%) report that growth on the consumer side was weaker than expected, as opposed to just 25.7% in the VR for enterprise segment.

Attempting to chase this growth, XR technology and content providers are following suit and shifting their focus towards providing enterprise XR solutions, with 73% of these companies saying they are working on VR for enterprise functions and just under 65% doing the same for AR/MR, as opposed to less than half working on VR consumer functions and 37.4% working on AR/MR.

Likewise, hardware, software and third-party content creators for extended reality (XR) are seeing much stronger enterprise growth compared to consumer sector growth over the last 12 months: almost half (49.2%) reported that growth on the consumer side was weaker than expected, as opposed to just 25.7% in the VR for enterprise segment.

One explanation of dip in XR for consumer applications may be the gaming industry; a significant source of early growth for XR, this years’ survey shows far less interest in gaming from XR technology companies: in 2018, 50% of respondents said that they intended to work within the gaming industry over the next 12 months, but this had fallen to just a third of respondents from the supply side of XR in the 2019 results. Despite this, consumer entertainment content creators in the XR space continue to find value in XR, with 75.9% of that segment reporting that VR had had a very…