What the numbers say: The push for virtual reality will continue to rise in the upcoming years. Projections for the next five years for AR/VR headsets sold see a steady rise in product demand. By 2027, headsets are expected to hit 30 million units sold, according to IDC. Relevance: Apple announced its Apple Vision Pro virtual reality headset at WWDC 23 yesterday. Unlike its predecessors in the AR/VR reality headset market, Apple priced its headset based on all it can do instead of as a loss leader to get more units sold. Meta, Samsung, Bytedance, and more have priced headsets at a lower price point to try to drive demand. But Apple is pricing its offering at just shy of $3,500 when it becomes available in 2024. More companies are said to be releasing new headsets this year, including Meta, HTC, and PlayStation. More data: Looking at data from previous years, the AR/VR headset sales market in the U.S. has seen some rise but a bit of a tapered-off increase in 2022. Last year, 19.14 million units were sold, but in 2021, the push for them had doubled, likely coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the sales jumped from 7.86 million in 2020 to 14.25 million. Back in 2017, only 3.8 million units were sold. |
