According to XRDC’s 2019 AR/VR Innovation Report, their survey of over 900 professionals revealed several insights, including that Oculus Rift surpassed HTC Vive as developers preferred platform and that client funding for XR projects has increased by 4% compared to last year. However, it should be noted that there’s only a 5% difference between Rift and Vive, and that the vast majority of funding for XR projects still comes from existing company funds.
XRDC’s report also notes that there is a growing concern amongst the XR field over the costs of producing quality virtual reality (VR) titles being too high when compared to the size of the prospective audience. Therefore, the reason why company funds are the predominant source of XR project funding could mostly be from well-established corporations.
“Funding is plentiful, but most of the money gets swallowed up by the largest corporations,” said one of XRDC’s respondents. “Unfortunately, small and medium sized companies are growing by acquisition into larger companies rather than solo development. Small and medium companies shoulder such a large amount of the risks to bring a product to market. It would be great to have some capital or resources to bring visibility to these smaller projects before they are selling off company assets.”
However, the report notes that the release of the Oculus Quest is somewhat helping to alleviate that anxiety.
“I think the biggest hurdle to VR has been long setup times with cubes, computer configurations, and so on,” wrote in one survey-taker. “There have been recent advances in this area though that address those concerns. Headsets like the Quest hit all the checkboxes to make wide-spread VR deployment realistic.”
Most interestingly, of the over 900 respondents that were polled, three-quarters of them believe that augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) will win out over VR. This perception makes sense given concerns about VR headset sales, while AR can be used by the billions of smartphones in the wild.
“Phone or tablet based AR has a large theoretical user base, but in return their content and interaction forms are constrained as one constantly has to hold the device in the hands,” notes another respondent.
Though XRDC’s report notes trepidation among the XR field, developers on the whole are still excited about the future of the XR field as hardware and software matures to the point of bringing in robust experiences, namely in medical devices and industry training such as the Da Vinci robotic assistant at UAB Hospital and Rolls-Royce’s airplane engine training for Qatar Airways.
“The technology is in a place where developers are able to push the envelope pretty consistently, so I think we are going to see some really great advancement,” a respondent wrote.
