"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" (Shanghai, editor Li Honghui) news, according to TrendForce Jibang Consulting research shows that in 2022 AR/VR device shipments will be revised up to 14.19 million units, an annual growth rate of 43.9%, the growth momentum from the epidemic increased demand for long-distance interaction, and Oculus Quest 2 price reduction strategy, Microsoft HoloLens 2 (MSFT. US) and Oculus Quest 2 (FB. US) market accounted for the first place in AR and VR, respectively.
CITIC Securities believes that the gradual growth of next-generation technology hardware such as VR/AR will become one of the three main lines of development of the meta-universe in the next 3-5 years. In addition, in the next 5 years, VR/AR hardware annual sales are expected to grow to 50 million units, if the hardware technology is further breakthrough, medium and long-term sales scale of hundreds of millions of can be expected, is still in the hardware and content exploration period.
Guosheng Securities pointed out that after experiencing the trough period of 2016-2019, the VR/AR industry achieved steady development in 2020, and the overseas consumer VR market gradually opened.
According to the IDC report, VR has been widely used in the fields of B-end real estate, retail, home improvement, security and education, rapidly driving industry change.
In terms of C-end consumption, consumer-grade VR applications are mainly concentrated in the game/social field, taking the premier application distribution platform SteamVR as an example, the current number of content exceeds 6,000. As of January 2022, the proportion of VR headset users on the Steam platform reached 2.14%, a significant increase from 0.91% at the beginning of 2019.
Sales of Pico, another consumer VR equipment manufacturer, have also attracted attention. According to IDC data, Pico ranked first in China's domestic VR all-in-one market in 2020, with a market share of 57.8% in Q4 in 2020. Since its inception, its total sales of VR headsets have exceeded 500,000 units. According to official data, during the Spring Festival from 2022.1.31 to 2022.2.7, Pico's omni-channel Spring Festival sales volume increased by 32 times year-on-year, and the turnover increased by 29 times compared with last year's Spring Festival.
Xu Tao, an analyst at CITIC Securities, believes that as VR equipment gradually meets the needs of economy, comfort, immersion, interoperability, etc., its hardware form will gradually evolve from the current PC and all-in-one machine to pure headset (no handle) and cloud VR; in addition, VR equipment is expected to move towards MR form in the medium and long term, accumulating a variety of basic technologies for AR applications. In the future, AR will emphasize interaction (light application), and VR will focus on immersion (heavy application). VR product attributes from the current entertainment-oriented to more efficiency-enhancing scenarios, it is expected that VR functions will break the circle of the application layer after adding more interoperability.