At the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, USA, supporters believe that while most virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are still in production. In the prototype and development tools phase, the market is expected to break out in 2018.
According to Eyetouch Reality, an AR/VR application developer who participated in a symposium held during GDC, and TIm Merel, co-founder and CEO of AR/VR investment agency Digi-Capital, “In the long run, we think virtual reality Will have hundreds of millions of users, and will eventually eat into the mobile phone market."
According to Merel and other peers in the symposium, virtual reality devices refer to devices that provide an immersive experience that allows users to experience virtual scenes, such as Daqri smart helmets; augmented reality is the ability to digitally Products that overlap into the real world, such as Microsoft's HoloLens and Meta's smart glasses.
According to statistics, from January to February 2016, the amount of investment in the AR and VR fields reached US$1.1 billion – the first time the investment in this field exceeded US$1 billion; of which US$800 million was funded by the display startup Magic. Leap acquired the AR-based retina display developed by the company to superimpose computer-generated images onto real-world objects.
Digi-Capital predicts that AR/VR revenues will reach $120 billion by 2020; VR's success will be primarily related to the consumer market, and AR will have revenue from diversified vertical markets. Merel pointed out that future mobile operators have the opportunity to charge more data traffic costs because customers need to drive higher picture update rates and stereo images.
Between 2018 and 2019 will be the turning point for AR applications beyond VR applications
Merel said that from the top companies to millions of small startups are ready to enter the AR / VR market, for example, China's AR / VR market is also growing rapidly.
Digi-Capital said that the VR market will take the lead, because the technology is driven by the game industry and is expected to reach a market size of $30 billion. As for the AR system, it is driven by user scenarios like smart phones. Including online business, car head-up display, etc.; in the future it may further grow into a $120 billion pie.
Merel also predicts that the price of AR/VR hardware will decline from 2018 to 2019, and many problems surrounding battery life, vision and support for cellular communication will be solved. Consumers will then be able to use Devices like smart glasses replace smart phones."
At the same time, AR/VR devices launched by smart phones, that is, head-mounted devices (HMDs), also face similar problems with mobility and power consumption; for this developer Seebright's chief mobile officer Simon Solotko said: "Our goal is to get power consumption to perhaps 15 watts, which is not a lot of power consumption for high-performance graphics processing."
In order to solve the power consumption and mobility of the head-mounted device, Solotko also suggested adding a graphics processor behind the user; he also hopes that the next generation of CPU and GPU technology will evolve, providing HMD like a table. The performance of the computer and the improvement of the overall characteristics.
As for the high-resolution memory bandwidth that currently poses a challenge to HMD performance levels, Solotko believes that there is no need to worry: "Everyone's eyes are focused on this issue."
Guangzhou Ehang Electronic Co., Ltd. , https://www.ehangmobile.com