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As Sales Slide, Virtual Reality Fans Look to a Bright, Untethered Future

Accepted submission by Phoenix666 at 2018-12-04 13:47:17
Hardware

El Reg [theregister.co.uk]:

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 [ccsinsight.com] 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 [theregister.co.uk] 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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