Coinciding with the arrival of Vive Pro, the Taiwanese company is placed in this quarter ahead of Oculus and Sony, according to IDC data.
firm IDC has shared the data of virtual reality viewer shipments corresponding to the second quarter of the year, a period for which desktop HMDs have suffered a reduction of 37.3%, caused by the main brands have not been able to maintain the momentum after their price reductions in 2017, they explain. During this period (for which they do not quote Windows MR viewers), HTC added 111,000 shipments, Oculus 102,000 and PSVR 93,000. HTC’s momentum is noted to be due to the arrival of Vive Pro and the growing popularity of the Viveport subscription service, which Rift users can already access as well.
As for autonomous viewers, they have experienced a growth of 417.7%, driven largely by the launch of Oculus Go (Xiaomi Mi VR in China), which has achieved during the second quarter a total of 212,000 shipments. Finally, the category of casing (viewers that require a mobile phone) has added 409,000 shipments, being these devices the main responsible for the decline in shipments of the entire VR viewer market (by 33.7%), which last year handled a figure close to one million.
“In a market where VR content for the masses is not coming, an increasing number of providers are looking to the enterprise for a way to build their business while waiting for consumers to catch up,” he says Mr. Liuhuabing from IDC. “These vendors are moving beyond entertainment-focused B2C implementations, jumping into real-world training scenarios for businesses of all sizes and around the world. We estimate that buyers from the commercial sector will represent an increasingly important percentage of the market in the future.”
IDC expects this decline in year-on-year growth to be a temporary setback “as the market finds its way.” The arrival of new products, such as Oculus Go and Vive Pro, and new brands, together with the need for greater visual fidelity of the viewers, point to a positive outlook for the coming quarters, they say.
The company also notes that during the estimated period, 20% of the shipments of the visors has been destined to the business sector, experiencing a growth of 14% compared to the same quarter last year. In turn, the average price has increased from $ 333 to $ 442.
For this year they expect a total of 8.1 million shipments of viewers, of which approximately 3.5 million will be desktop viewers and 1.2 will be autonomous.
