And it’s finally here! The year of virtual reality has officially begun and we can now read about new predictions and trends that will roll out this year. Some of them are already pretty obvious, others can be guessed upon their latest activities, and I guess there'll be those unpredictable ones that will surprise us all the most.
According to Juniper Research, 2016 is a “watershed year for VR” when mass market converts to immersive, and online content becomes physicallyaccessible. Our 3D doppelgängers will get their first real breakthrough in 2016, and will provide us with benefits that will change our lives for good. When I say benefits I do indeed take into account all the possible VR content that we’ll soon experience, including games - as they are a part of entertainment, the groundwork of virtual reality.
I’ve already seen several profound ways of using VR, which I believe will have their daily grind established by the end of 2016. These are some of the most promising:
Immersive Travel - to precisely choose your next travel destinations, travel companies (such as Thomas Cook and Qantas) are already offering immersive ways of testing your holidays before booking it.
Immersive Sports - For the first time ever, NBA fans might just get to have better seats by staying at home than actually going to see their fave match. A week ago, the NBA star LeBron James teamed with Oculus and Samsung to create the first VR experience Striving for Greatness that changes the way sports fan see basketball.
Immersive journalism - The media industry is now on its way to adopt virtual reality as the mainstream, thanks to The New York Times. The newspaper’s step into VR is to set a great example for others, and implement that real experience into our daily news consumption. Likewise, there are other immersive journalism projects, such as Ryot, that have paved their way to 2016s VR trends - and I believe they're going to show us even more stunning things this year.
VR Hardware of 2016
When it comes to VR hardware, 2016 seems bright for these VR headsets:
Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Sony Playstation VR, Google Cardboard, Microsoft Hololens, Fove VR, Zeiss VR One, Avegant Glyph, Razer OSVR, Archos VR Headset, Freefly VR.
VR headsets sales prediction by TrendForce points out that 14 million VRdevices will be sold in 2016, which will be a kind of a launching year for the upcoming 20% - 40% growth in the next 5 years. Sounds good to me!
An overall view of the future of VR is smoothly explained by UploadVR recently:
Virtual reality market is expected to grow by over 13,000% in next 3 years, nearly 5 times faster than the iPhone.
Well, that seems like a good starting point for all us VR entrepreneurs. Shifting from To be to It is is likely happening already. 2016 sounds promising, and above all, highly demanding when it comes to VR.
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