With technology giants such as Huawei, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc., successively added to the card, VR can be regarded as one of the most watched tracks this year. Now the policy boost has added fire to the industry.
Today, at the press conference of the Cloud Summit of the 2021 World VR Industry Conference, Hou Jianren, the second-level inspector of the Electronic Information Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that in the next step, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will continue to promote the high-quality development of my country’s virtual reality industry in accordance with the relevant deployment and requirements of the central government. A new development pattern that promotes each other.
Focus on three areas of work: one is to accelerate industrial integration and innovation, and to cultivate new business formats; the second is to promote the development of industrial agglomeration and create new heights; the third is to deepen cooperation and open up to the outside world, and jointly innovate the market.
Hardware development, software empowerment, VR change is approaching
Five years ago, VR’s reputation rose, capital swarmed in, and giants entered the game one after another. However, a year later, the situation has taken a turn for the worse. Immature technology has extinguished the enthusiasm of consumers. Global VR/AR venture capital has plummeted, and the industry has entered a cold winter.
Since last year, the situation has changed again-under the epidemic, the sales of VR equipment have increased significantly. The development of components and complete machine production lines in all links of the industry chain is also becoming more complete, and key technologies continue to usher in breakthroughs, which drives the continuous expansion of market demand.
Take the VR industry leader Facebook as an example. At the end of March, the Facebook AR/VR director announced that the sales of Oculus Quest 2 had exceeded the sum of all previous Oculus headsets, and VR had ushered in a “mainstream moment.”
According to the statistics of the Foresight Research Institute, this year’s pan-entertainment application market such as VR games and videos accounted for about 59%, which is currently the main application field of VR. In addition, Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview that one of Facebook’s current goals is to expand the base of VR users.
According to the analysis by Peng Hu and Li Chengning of CICC, high-quality VR games are currently the main way for Facebook to cultivate a stable user ecology. After the existing users reach tens of millions, the company will shift to the development of applications such as VR office and social networking.
With the gradual expansion of industrial software applications, the ceiling of VR hardware shipments will also be opened. In 2020, the shipment of VR equipment is close to 10 million units, and it is expected to exceed 15 million units in 2021. In addition, a variety of blockbuster products will be released soon, and the VR industry may usher in changes next year.
So what’s the difference in VR this time?
According to the analysis of Zheshang Securities Research Report, now that VR products are upgraded and the ecology is perfect, people’s acceptance of VR has further improved. Compared with 2016, there are three main differences in current VR products:
1. Portability: The nature of portability is the requirement for computing power. Now, after several iterations, chip upgrades have improved the portability of the product;
2. Sense of experience: Vision is one of the important factors that determine people’s sense of VR experience. 4K screen has become the mainstream configuration of VR all-in-one machines today, and display upgrades promote the sense of experience;
3. Cost-effectiveness: the content side is drawn to backfill the hardware cost, and the hardware is sold at a cost price. The new business model promotes the improvement of cost-effectiveness and reaches the price range acceptable to C-end consumers.
In the opinion of many industry insiders, when the shipment of VR equipment reaches 10 million units, it will be the “singularity” of the industry.
According to the analysis of Tianfeng Securities Research Report, this singularity is expected to arrive in the second half of this year, and global sales are expected to reach 20 million units by the end of 2022.
For the market size in the next few years, Tianfeng Securities will provide an annual growth rate of 54%; IDC predicts that my country’s commercial VR market will reach 92.18 billion yuan in 2024; Zuckerberg believes that the future consumption of VR will be comparable to that of mobile phones. PC.
CITIC Securities pointed out that the R&D projects and capital investment of domestic companies in the VR/AR industry have increased significantly, and they have formed a certain economic effect. The industry has entered a stage of rapid growth and is optimistic about VR/AR industry chain companies for a long time.