More Than 500 VR Professionals Sound Off In Recent Survey
VRX Event and VR Intelligence recently conducted a survey with more than 500 VR professionals and found that “26% expected more from their VR business last year, but 46% of respondents said they saw strong or very strong growth”, Gamesindustry.biz reports.
Besides discussing sales, the survey also highlighted which VR platforms were being supported. A third of the respondents reported that they were focused on mobile VR, another third were concentrated on PC and console tethered VR while the final third reported that they split their development between the two. Overall, it’s a pretty clean split between the three VR markets.
When it came to pinpointing the setbacks for the VR industry, the consensus was far more murkier with some disagreement between VR content creators and VR tech workers. More than half the VR content creators commented that the high price of VR headsets was still a problem whereas over half of VR tech workers such as hardware manufacturers and middleware creators argued that lack of content was to blame.
Other issues facing the industry included the lack of consumer awareness, headset size and design, motion sickness and headset usability. For VR tech workers, the two latter issues were tied as the least important problem. Similarly, VR content creators felt motion sickness and headset usability wasn’t a key issue to tackle.
In other VR business news, Wall Street Journal recently reported that Sony is investigating ways to take its PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset to new commercial sectors as a “slower than expected” sales after its launch in October last year. Sony said that it doesn’t currently have plans to run its own VR facilities, but is looking to focus on getting its PSVR tech installed at public places such as theme parks and arcades in Japan initially.
It’ll be interesting to see if Sony’s proposed solutions may help offset some of the woes mentioned above.