Augmented/ Virtual Reality
The AR/VR industry as a whole is growing rapidly, with the market size of consumer virtual reality hardware and software projected to increase from 6.2 billion USD in 2019 to more than 16 billion USD in 2022, even after taking into account negative impacts from the COVID-19 epidemic. Globally, the augmented reality and virtual reality markets are valued at 18.8 billion USD as of 2019. Data on headset shipments to consumers indicate that standalone devices, such as the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest (which are manufactured by Facebook), are becoming increasingly popular, followed by console devices (such as the PlayStation VR), personal computing devices (such as the HTC Vive), and premium mobile devices (such as the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR).
Currently, consumer purchases constitute the majority of sales in this space, however, it is anticipated that commercial sales will meet or eclipse consumer sales volume by 2022. With regard to the largest players in virtual reality headset manufacturing, Sony has the largest market share, followed by Facebook (Oculus), and HTC (all other players combined constitute a market share less than that of HTC). In terms of augmented reality, several large tech firms have invested heavily in developing new solutions, however, many of these solutions are either still in development (eg. Microsoft Hololens), or are SDKs for existing devices such as smartphones (eg. Apple ARKit and Google ARCore).