Zion Market Research has published a new report on Virtual Reality (VR): “Virtual reality (VR) Market by Hardware and Software for (Consumer, Commercial, Enterprise, Medical, Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, Energy and Others) Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2016 – 2022”, where it shows the global economic data of this trend and forecasts how it will evolve. The company expects RV to reach $26.89 billion by 2022, growing to a CAGR of 54.01 between 2017 and 2022.
In addition, it should be noted that VR has been introduced in many industries, such as retail, healthcare, e-commerce and automotive. In healthcare, great advances are being made in REHABILITATION through VR and the treatment of mental health problems such as fears and phobias.
The impact of VR and RA could reach $29.5 billion by 2020
The statistics show different growth scenarios in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality, from 2016 to 2020. If high-adoption occurs, the economic impact of Virtual and Augmented Reality could reach $29.5 billion by 2020.
On the other hand, despite the great success of Virtual Reality, at the beginning of the year it was shown that Augmented Reality reached 80 billion dollars, compared to Virtual Reality, which was 25 billion.
But, according to Zion Market Research, the global Virtual Reality (VR) market has been valued at about 2,020 in 2016, and Zion expects approximately $26.89 billion to reach by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 54.01 between 2017 and 2022. One of the reasons for this growth is the clear increase in smartphones, tablets and other gatgets compatible with Virtual Reality. This technology that was initially focused on the video game industry is increasingly penetrating the work, supporting workflow and improving operations. But what industries has it opened to? Some to highlight are retail, healthcare, e-commerce and automotive. And, even though the user interface (UI) is still limited, it is expected to increase the investment of global players in Virtual Reality applications.
“We’ve focused on% creating engaging VR experiences, knowing that adoption of this technology is growing steadily, and it’s inevitable in the coming years,” TheWaveVR said. “The timeline has gone almost exactly as developers expected, with 2016 being the ultimate state of inflated expectations, and this year (and probably part of next year) it’s the ‘point of disappointment’.”
However, for this company and many others, the key is not distribution.
“While we expect the price to drop, and the overall UX improves, developers like us and other companies like Against Gravity, Squanchtendo and Mindshow are addressing the biggest challenge: learning how to design for average users,” Arrigo said.
Among the current problems is that the hardware is uncomfortable, difficult to configure. In addition, the user experience is key, as users will only focus on those experiences they don’t find in reality. By region, current demand is concentrated in: USA, Germany, France, UK, China, Japan, India and Brazil. But, of all regions, the Asia Pacific region is expected to lead this market, in terms of revenue, and its growth rate may be the highest by 2022. This momentum is justified by the development of R&D centres, the growing acceptance of emerging technologies in countries such as India, China and Japan – RV market drivers.
The RV made a live performance possible
As noted, Virtual Reality applications are numerous. In fact, recently thousands of Virtual Reality users, through their Oculus or Vive headphones, were able to see electronic artist Ash Koosha.
Facebook made it possible to perform an hour live, thanks to SteamVR’s servers, rendered hundreds of frames per second to make it possible. In addition, they created a virtual place, by the hand of TheWaveVR. In addition, it offered different shows with animated avatars.
“There are no borders within virtual reality,” TheWaveVR co-founder Aaron Lemke said in a statement. “We have been working hard to develop a community that is positive and inclusive, where everyone is welcome. Soon artists will be able to use our platform to reach all their admirers at once, and these man-made physical limits will not have as much power.”
This is just one of the many applications of VR, a powerful tool that cannot be easily discarded by current limitations.
Virtual Reality allows artists and their followers to cross borders, it offers a safe space where you can interact, completely immersive. In fact, TheWaveVR, which continues to attract sponsors, is an example of how Virtual Reality can be applied in different industries.
RV rehabilitation is a success: a patient walks again
Virtual Reality in the field of healthcare can contribute a lot. In fact, the% 16 of the projects of this technology in the world are related to the health sector, according to The App Date’s Hormigos, data that he provided in Telefónica’s latest Thinking Party dedicated to the VR world. In addition, initiatives in this field account for around 2.8 billion euros in volume, and continue to grow.
Among the latest notable advances is that of a patient, Lara, who suffered a bicycle accident that caused her spinal fracture, spinal cord injuries whose diagnosis seemed to be irretrievably paraplegia.
However, at the FOREN clinic, located in Tres Cantos (Madrid), they opted for Virtual Reality to try to reverse that diagnosis. With a mixture of perseverance, rehabilitation, scientific-technological research happened: Lara walks.
“Here you work very hard so that people who can’t walk, who can’t move a hand, who can’t talk, do it again,” said its creator, Charo Ortín.
The idea arose by studying what happens to motor neurons when the pyramidal tract is damaged by different causes.
“We understood how movement neurons behave and what factors are important for their maximum arousal. That’s when we saw that Virtual Reality could be a solution, because it allows to favor the mechanisms of that plasticity.”
Following this conclusion, Ortín got a team that developed the project: an immersive experience through RV glasses, that would allow the patient to see himself making the movement he is theoretically making. And so it happened with Lara, after three months, and four hours a day with the RV exercise, Lara’s foot moved.
In addition to Lara, the center has twelve patients performing RV rehabilitation, of which a study of the results is being carried out.
“We have seen that therapy is a plus,” says the doctor, “But it’s not enough: We would have to do multicenter, control studies… That takes a lot of resources and that’s the other big problem of medical virtual reality: funding. In the public it is complicated, because they are very meticulous with all the evidence, so we will probably start with the private and then we will go public. It’s a shame, because in the public you reach everyone, but I understand it: you have to make sure that the tool works and it is not harmful”,
This is just one example of the range of possibilities offered by VR, however, one of the big drawbacks is scientific evidence, since, according to Ortín: “we are in diapers”.
Virtual Reality Helps Tackle Phobias
Virtualware believes that the importance lies in the practical application. This Spanish company dedicated to Virtual Reality has been in different industries: it started in real estate, but after the bubble decided to try in the tourism sector, although it is currently in the health sector, specifically it is in psychological treatment and diagnosis, such as phobias or trauma. The latter has been interested in King’s College London.
“They knew our VirtualRet project and told us they wanted to do something similar for social phobias: public speaking and behavior in social settings. In fact, the project immerses the client in an Irish pub and puts him in front of different scenarios, to study what his reactions are like and for the doctor to work with them.” Said Jesús Garrido, one of the responsible for Virtualware.
“We are technologists, we are not able to say or know if anything we are inventing is going to help a patient or not. That’s why we always rely on a medical team: neuropsychologists, occupational therapists… They don’t have to say what processes or scenarios to take. We have a very good relationship with medical centers and patient associations: we are telling them the technology that is going to appear and they are telling us what needs they have or where they believe that technology could be applied.”
Psious, is another company focused on the therapeutic capabilities of VR for the treatment of phobias.
“The idea from the beginning was to make people less afraid, to free the minds of all those obstacles that arise in different ways: anxiety, fear of flying, fear of drawing blood or fear of speaking in public,” explains Ramon Tisaire, president of the company until September of this year.
To safeguard their scientific evidence, Psious states that they are not only technology providers, but are part of the project as they have a Chief Medical Officer, a chief psychologist and other health team on their staff. Despite this, they cannot rule out studies and clinical trials.
Swisslog shows its technological advances thanks to Virtual Reality
Another area of Virtual Reality is the manufacturing sector. Swisslog, has recently participated in the VII Congress Supply Chain organized by Aecoc and in it, showed an RV simulation, where users can walk through a facility to see how it works, the layout of the corridors, paths, ducts, and the relationship between people and machines in the future warehouse, with the aim of offering companies the possibility to verify criteria such as ergonomics, maintenance and accessibility.
In addition, the simulation saw other Swisslog technological advances, such as the Vectura pallet stacking crane, the PowerStore PalletShuttleSystem, a robotic storage and recovery system designed for in-depth storage of loads and the CycloneCarrier, a light goods transport system.
According to the company, Virtual Reality and emerging technologies will make it possible to perform virtual simulations that will facilitate error correction, incident prevention, training, visits to distant warehouses, analysis of operation and , even interaction with other users.
A common language needs to be generated to connect concepts
Mozilla is trying to develop a framework that tries to allow developers standardized and documented tools to be able to access a mixed reality platform that the user chooses.
It is not the first time that the company has focused on this technology, previously working with large companies like Google on a WebVR API, which allowed browsers to launch Virtual Reality experiences. From there was its successor: WebXR, which includes a few more features.
“We’ve talked to Google people in the past about how to implement Augmented Reality ideas on the web, given them their feedback on what they’ve done with their WebAR example implementations, and we’re making sure that our WebXR javascript library work in your apps so developers have the freedom to use the apps they want to experiment with with these new technologies on the web,” explained Senior Research Scientist Mozilla MacIntyre in an email TechCrunch.
Keep in mind that you develop on the web and deploy to a mobile device or other device, Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality headsets, etc. It needs to be done in a less complete way. That is, generate a common language to connect concepts. For example, anchoring objects despite deployment changes between ARCore, ARKit, Hololens, and other platforms.
“Right now we believe that the evolution of WebVR to include support for AR capabilities would be the best long-term outcome,” MacIntyre said. “These changes can be relatively small, and the API is still called WebVR, or the community may decide to adopt more comprehensive changes and rename it to WebXR or even WebMR.”
