AWE (Augmented World Expo) is the world's number one AR+VR conference and expo since 2010. It is hosted by the International Augmented Reality Industry Association in Silicon Valley, USA, and its core mission is to promote the overall development of the AR/VR industry.

Since its establishment in 2009, the AWE Conference has been held annually in the United States, Europe and Asia. After more than ten years of development, AWE has become a place for Fortune 500 companies to find business solutions, form strategic partnerships, find financing channels, recruit talents, and the birth of new start-up companies.

AWE Asia 2020 will kick off on August 15-16, 2020 at the Hyatt Regency Shenzhen Airport in China.

In the current epidemic, billions of people are trapped at home, and a way to relieve boredom is urgently needed. The life of home isolation is quite difficult, and at the current moment, virtual reality technology (VR) seems to be a "timely rain".

For several years, VR has been struggling to win over consumers. But today, the epidemic is reshaping every aspect of society, from work to the medical system. This drastic change creates new opportunities for VR to have a disruptive impact.

How The Coronavirus Crisis Will Shape The Future Of Virtual Reality?

The development of the VR industry: 2012-present

The Sensorama, launched in 1962, may be regarded as the first real "VR" experience. This mechanical device uses five senses to simulate the experience of riding a motorcycle in Brooklyn. As Oculus VR announced the launch of Oculus Rift in 2012, it was acquired by Facebook in 2014; then in 2016, the "VR first year" appeared, Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR), HTC’s Vive, and Samsung’s Gear VR and other equipment have appeared one after another, and the VR market has been in an intermittent development trend in recent years.

(The search interest of VR headsets is "United States")

What does this mean for the development of the industry?

01 Both ends of the VR market丨

Business users and individual consumers

Although the enterprise-side VR market and the consumer-side VR market are ultimately complementary to each other, they both have their own unique development momentum and are at different stages of development and maturity. For example, in terms of the speed of VR adoption, business users are twice as fast as individual consumers.

(Enterprise's survey feedback on the growth of VR and AR business in the past 12 months)

02 Consumer VR market丨Game-driven competition for preemption

On the other hand, the consumer-side VR market may cause the boundaries between large platforms and content developers to become increasingly blurred, because they all want to compete for users and user data.

For example, Oculus acquired the developer of the number one VR game-"Beat Saber". Valve has also developed video games, head-mounted display devices and Steam game software stores. Steam is a very interesting success story in the vertical integration strategy. Since 2016, the number of head-mounted display devices it diverts every month has been increasing exponentially.

If this trend continues, the demand for games is likely to drive the growth of the consumer VR market in the near future. With the upcoming release of the VR-compatible PS5 in the second half of this year, signs of recovery in the supply chain, and rumors that Quest equipment is about to be upgraded, the Christmas holiday in 2020 is expected to become a weather vane for the mature development of the consumer VR market.

The possible impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic on the enterprise VR market in 2020

The new crown epidemic has forced rapid changes in all areas of society. People's work, education, and medical systems will not go back in the past, and some interesting exploration practices have emerged in these fields, and new opportunities are being created.

01 Remote office and distance learning

In just a few months, the number of users on the Zoom platform has grown from 10 million to 300 million. This large-scale user growth has led to new use cases (such as virtual video conferencing), best practices (such as freely enabling the mute button), and various specifications (such as virtual backgrounds seem to have been widely accepted).

These experiences all involve a certain degree of visual data processing and analysis. With the development of digital life in the direction of 3D, ensuring that these experiences can create a sense of reality, thereby facilitating the effective exchange of ideas and knowledge will become crucial. Creating a sense of reality does not necessarily require a head-mounted display device. For example, the artificial window concept created by Argodesign can simulate the scene of working with colleagues. VirBela is promoting the development of previous face-to-face meetings in a field similar to computer video games.

At the same time, companies such as Spatial are providing solutions for a full range of audio effects and 3D remote presence effects. They are creating realistic experiences that can be achieved with computers and VR equipment. This cross-platform experience is likely to gradually affect the user adoption curve.

02 Healthcare field

The "Affordable Care Act" promulgated after the 2008 financial crisis made the US medical development more inclined to community-based preventive health care services and began to encourage the use of technology to create value. The outbreak of the new crown epidemic may accelerate the development of these trends.

Family health care is the fastest growing area in the U.S. medical system. As people pay more and more attention to safety measures in nursing homes and hospitals, many Americans will increasingly receive community care when conditions permit.

If the new crown epidemic clarifies any truth, it is: the environment around us is very important. What you see when you look around and where your time is spent will profoundly affect how you feel.

Virtual reality technology allows us to create a variety of simulated environments that can elicit specific physiological and emotional responses. With this technological power, new medical interventions for pain, anxiety, phobia, stroke, dementia and other diseases can be provided.

Immersive therapy will eventually be regarded as a standard tool in the medical toolbox, just like drugs, equipment, surgery and various medical methods.

New opportunities for the development of the VR market

Changing deep-rooted behaviors and habits is extremely difficult, and this dynamic force often prevents people from adopting new technologies with disruptive potential.

Today, the new crown epidemic has put at least one-third of the world’s population under some kind of lockdown, which has led to a wide range of dynamic changes in behavior. Therefore, there is an unprecedented demand for technologies that can improve the limited physical environment. With the rapid development of virtual reality hardware, the time is ripe to develop new and transformative applications that can meet this demand.

Excerpted from "ARC Augmented Reality", "Under the epidemic crisis, what will the future trend of the VR market look like?"