The Unity CEO believes that virtual reality will reach 100 million users over the next 4 years and does not expect explosive growth to occur by 2017.
John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, participated in a Reddit “ask what you want” session in which he shared his vision about the future of virtual reality. Riccitiello claims that in a few years this new medium will reach the masses, and that it will eventually be directed by applications other than games, although currently the majority of the market is for video games. “I think VR will reach the masses in 2020, which means there will be 100 million consumers using the technology regularly. And I think that in 10 years we will see more than 1000 million people using VR applications,” Riccitiello commented.
Personally, he considers himself a big believer in this technology in the long term, but he has observed that it will not go as fast as it was supposed to. “I think it will take a few years for these platforms to reach audiences of tens and hundreds of millions as it happens today with video game consoles, or even thousands as in the mobile market. 2017 will be a year of growth, but without becoming explosive. Within three to five years, we will see big/massive games,” he concluded.
Unity is one of the main engines along with Unreal Engine and CryEngine that have opted for this technology and that have been supporting and improving update after update with new features to improve the experience of developers and users, as recently happened with the inclusion of the editor in virtual reality.
