Extended Reality — Extended Role for the Channel in 2023
Luc Van Huystee, VP, Mobility, and European executive lead for metaverse at TD SYNNEX, shares his personal perspective on the prospects for the extended reality market in 2023
- Extended reality investment looks set to continue
Despite the mixed headlines in 2022, the building out of the metaverse will continue in 2023 with the market for AR and VR solutions expected to be around $800 billion in revenue by 2024 globally (Source: Bloomberg Verified Research 2022).
The Meta corporation will keep its investment flowing into the metaverse while other important players are promising a stream of related or extended reality hardware solutions.
2. It’s not just a new consumer market — there is enterprise opportunity too
There will be a dual push on VR and AR in both the consumer and enterprise fields. A majority of Big Tech vendors have fresh consumer hardware technology launched or slated for this year. At the same time, there’s a host of new players coming to market like Pico and TCL — a market-leader in affordable premium technology products for the mass market — which announced at CES that it will be rolling out extended reality (XR) glasses for foreign travel translations.
However, while the major use case will be consumer, we should continue to expect extended reality to make parallel inroads into the enterprise space where business cases around training, design, development and support provide fertile ground for the technology in the workplace. Large corporations may also have the deep financial resources needed to invest in this area. Major players like Meta would seem to agree given the enterprise-level pricing and specification of their Quest Pro range including integration with enterprise applications like Microsoft 360.
3. A year of market evolution… not revolution
2023 will see a steady, not rapid, evolution of the extended reality market. This wi.l build on how key players have been advancing their offerings over the last few years and learning from previous false starts. A key accelerant for how extended reality progresses will be the extent to which the channel is able to bring complete solutions to life by aggregating current and impending hardware with related software, accessories, and services — especially financing.
4. Increased opportunities for the channel
We will see more major vendors who are investing in AR and VR kit examine how they can galvanise channel partners to identify and exploit extended reality opportunities. This creates challenges and opportunities for distributors to pull together all these different technology threads and aggregate solutions that answer real market demands. As this happens, we expect to see extend reality seeded into the channel with almost 1 in 5 European partners offering AR and VR solutions over the next 12–24 months, according to our recent Technology Ecosystem Benchmark Report.
Conversations about the future of the metaverse can obscure how the extended reality market has been gathering pace for several years now. The elements for its growth — hardware, software, services — are emerging and the channel can play a pivotal role in progressing the market for this new technology in 2023.
