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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the virtual-progress dept.

El Reg:

Wearable watchers, CCS Insight, had good news and bad news for the virtual and augmented reality industry today. Sales are tanking but look! New hardware!

The report underlines just how much the industry has been driven by users of smartphone-based VR, which peaked at 8 million units in 2017 before plummeting to just 3 million in 2018. The net result is the total VR shipments in 2018 will actually end up less than 2017.

[...] But all is not doom and gloom. Stand-alone VR is tipped to hit the big time in 2019, with 29 million of the wireless beauties expected to ship in 2022.

VR vendors, not least the Facebook-backed Oculus, hope so. The Oculus Quest is due to ship in 2019, free of the pesky wires and PC gear needed with the Rift. A cheaper tetherless variant, the Go, has already shipped.

Meanwhile, virtual reality cafes are empty.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:44AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:44AM (#769960) Journal

    I think directors will have a lot of trouble adapting movies to the VR medium, but maybe someone out there can carve a niche doing it. Look no further than video games such as Skyrim to see examples of "cinematic sequences" where the player can move their head or even move around. Worst case scenario, you get some art films done in VR and some low-brow Hardcore Henry type films, but very few VR films per year overall.

    Notice that I said VR video in my comment, not movies. There are a lot of situations in which 360-degree video capture could be of value. And it can also be done live. Thinking of those recent "yellow vest" protests, photojournalists or participants have the ability to live stream with 360-degree cameras. Both the platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Periscope, and others) and cameras can do this. But most will do 2D livestreams since there are more people viewing those and the cameras are cheaper (or they just use their smartphones). Maybe some livestreaming 360-degree cameras could transmit both 360-degree and forward-facing 2D at the same time, so you could have two simultaneous streams from one camera.

    We'll probably see the cutting edge of VR video content come out of BBC and National Geographic with short nature docs done in 360-degrees.

    I'd like to see 360-degree cameras streaming live 24/7 from some locations. Maybe mount one on top of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, or something.

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