Someone in Reddit's Oculus group was nice enough to upload Goldman Sach's widely cited forecast of the VR and AR market released earlier this month. Which is nice, because while many outlets have cited its prediction that VR/AR might become a $80 billion market ($45 billion in hardware and $35 billion in software) by 2025, no outlet I know has reported the most important figure of all: How many people should we expect to actually own a VR/AR device in the next decade?
So taken straight from the report, here's the range, which Goldman divides into three tiers of adoption:
So if adoption is slow (i.e. "Delayed"), only about 40-50 million units ship by 2025. If adoption is massive (i.e. "Accelerated"), we get more like 300 million units in the same time frame. Like most readers of this virtual world blog, I think the bearish estimate sounds about right. 40-50 million would make the addressable VR/AR market equivalent to a niche gamer device like the Nintendo 3DS. 300 million units in a decade is what VR would need to have any chance at reaching the "billions" of users Mark Zuckerberg predicted when he announced his company's acquisition of Oculus. In either case, as the chart shows, Goldman expects adoption to be significantly slower than smartphones, which is very on point.
I'll be delving more into this report, because while this adoption forecast seems (safely) accurate, I think it's making several very shaky assumptions that should be considered more closely. Since after all, Goldman Sachs is still the world's most reputable financial institution. (Notwithstanding that whole, you know, helped-almost-cause-a-global-depression thing.)
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Goldman Sacks has been involved in 'non-reality' for quite sometime and making lots of money by conjuring things out of thin air.
So maybe they know something?
Posted by: joe | Monday, January 25, 2016 at 05:23 PM
Right on the target Joe. If the "owners" of the World say it will be like that, it will probably happen cause they will make sure of it.
Posted by: zz bottom | Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 02:09 AM
Unless "America" will wake up!
Posted by: zz bottom | Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 02:10 AM
I think adoption will be higher because of the applications in education. One L.A. union is already reported to be using VR to teach spray painting. Medical applications are being reported on that assist surgeons.
Such applications will get more people exposed to the tech. That usually means they'll want it for other uses.
Posted by: Nalates | Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 10:27 AM