Market Updates

A Reality check for AR/VR

May, 2019

From education to healthcare to manufacturing to retail. Augmented reality and virtual reality are more prevalent today than yesterday. With the prices coming down for VR headsets and making the gadget accessible to everyone by connecting it to smartphones is making people think if AR technology is at everyone’s fingertips.

Adoption is driven by NEED

AR/VR is yet to find many use cases apart from education and entertainment segment. The technology is promising and as per estimates of three years ago AR/VR was expected to grow at an early three-digit CAGR because of the immersive abilities of the technology. Big companies such as Google, Samsung, Sony, Facebook have already come out with its products in this sector expecting AR/VR to grow the highest.

Education and entertainment sector as expected by industry experts have lapped the opportunity to make use of this technology and they are expected to grow the highest. With a burst in many interactive learning software and immersive games on the rack.

Real estate and manufacturing that are not very technology friendly have shown great promise due to the ability to showcase the product in designing stage.

Healthcare sector that was expected to be one of the fastest growing markets based on the ability to overcome certain challenge such as a smaller number of medical practitioners and specialist doctors guiding technicians elsewhere for expert advices. This technology could not grow big on healthcare sector because of the lack of confidence in technology and dearth in graphical technology experts coupled. This sector also promised to help in realising farfetched dreams such as patient’s body mapping to come in handy before going for critical procedures.

Even though, AR/VR had shown early promise to be the next big thing with respect to consumer products. The supporting technology didn’t live up to the expectation due to many limitations such as graphical content to make product immersive for all businesses to harness products to AR/VR.

- Sishir Naren
ICT - Research Analyst
Infoholic Research