Virtual Reality: Huge Investment Support Accelerates Innovations and Expands Application Scope

The rapid growth of the virtual reality (VR) market is attracting substantial private and federal investments to innovative start-ups, mostly in the areas of video, services and solutions, games and apps. With technological advances and improvements in user experience, VR will become more ubiquitous in industries such as healthcare, automotive, education, manufacturing, retail, design, aerospace and defense, and entertainment.

The incorporation of biosensory technology, speech recognition, movement mapping and space perception in VR will give a significant boost to posture and gesture recognition. Such technologies will increase the adoption rate of VR, especially in healthcare, in the areas of virtual surgery, immersive therapy and dentistry. Due to the widening scope of its application, VR as a Service will be an important business model in the future.

Future Applications of Virtual Reality (Immersive Computing), part of Frost & Sullivan’s TechVision (Information & Communication) Growth Partnership Service program, finds that the global VR hardware and software market is expected to grow from $1.37 billion in 2015 to $33.90 billion by 2022, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57.8 percent between 2016 and 2022.

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“Entrepreneurial support by ecosystem participants allows startup companies to adopt the role of demanding stakeholders,” noted Frost & Sullivan TechVision Research Analyst Mohammed Jawad. “They have the potential to emerge with disruptive technologies, while being insulated from global economic slowdowns and concerns about obtaining huge capital investments.”

Though VR is growing rapidly, it is still out of reach for many sectors. Less than 1 percent of the world’s computers have the graphical capabilities needed for VR to perform efficiently. Furthermore, the ecosystem of VR relies on vital technology capabilities such as battery efficiency.

“As cross-country and ecosystem partnerships play a major role in developing capabilities, global market participants work with an extensive network of partners to meet customer needs,” noted Jawad. “Meanwhile, technologies such as real-time analytics and beacon will be enabled within the VR/augmented reality environment, as they will impact VR’s adoption in business applications.”

The companies that are likely to lead the next phase of growth within the VR space are 900lbs of Creative, Evox Images, ZeroLight, Osso VR, Deepstream VR and VRsim. These innovators will increase job opportunities, widen the market and have a greater impact on the economic growth of the region.