IDC says Enterprises are Moving to Augmented and Virtual Reality Majorly Driven by Leading Use Cases with US$ 31.2 Billion Spend by 2023
According to the latest IDC Worldwide Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide, Asia/Pacific* spending on augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) is forecast to be $3.7 billion in 2019, an increase of 34.0% from the previous year.
Asia/Pacific* spending on AR/VR products and services will continue this strong growth throughout the forecast period (2018-23), with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 62.0%.
This growth is primarily driven by commercial industries which are going to be more than $11 billion larger than the consumer segment by the end of the forecast (2018-23). Despite this, the consumer segment (which is currently at $1.7 billion in 2019) continues to be larger than any other industry segment over the forecasted period.
The high growth in the commercial segment is primarily due to the AR/VR capability to solve complex business problems and streamline operations. The two industries that are seeing the most activities/implementation in Asia/Pacific* are education (US$ 495.3 million in 2019) and retail ($244.4 million in 2019), spending the most in this technology among other industries.
“Specialized training programs in the education system that includes VR pilot training through simulations, learning of human anatomy, etc. have given an opportunity to develop a specific skill set in the virtual environment. Leveraging this technology, the chances of making errors will not have fatal consequences during the training process. This has turned out to be a huge transition for institutes to save time for distance learning purposes and help in reducing cost due to the travel expenses incurred on students. Similarly, high-end retailers came across improvised customer engagement programs using this technology. This has also helped them in delivering the products based on customizing to a specific customer’s choice with the same or less time and effort. The technology has seen an increase in consideration and solutions around Online retail showcasing, retail showcasing, and virtual test drive,” says Ritika Srivastava, Associate Market Analyst at IDC India.
Despite the fact that the two industries have the highest market spend, there are other industries that have high potential to grow at a faster pace over the forecast period (2018-23) – with some of the new use cases in the pipeline. Retail (94.8% CAGR), followed by utilities, securities, investment services, and process manufacturing are the industries that are gaining momentum to explore the new use cases, and are lucrative in terms of investments. Use cases that dealt in operational tasks with the help of the Augmented Reality for performing tasks like assembly, maintenance, and repair have a lot of impetus within the industries.