- Global VR headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, marking their third consecutive year of declines due to the continued weak consumer demand.
- Meta continued to dominate the global VR market in 2024, capturing 77% of the shipments.
- In Q4 2024, the availability of the Meta Quest 3S boosted Meta’s market share to 84%.
- Shipments of Apple’s Vision Pro declined in Q4 after the initial hype. However, its enterprise sales saw an uptick.
- The global AR smart glasses market faced challenges in 2024, but we expect that the integration of AR and AI, along with new market entrants, will drive over 30% YoY growth in shipments through 2026.
like AI, corportions are obssesed with pushing a product onto consumer where theres no demand.
There is demand, but there are no truly great headsets. Vision can barely match quest and quest has way more contect, but it’s heavy and they seem to be slowly dropping PCVR support and I’m really not that interested in mobile apps, doesn’t even have google earth. HTC seems out of the game. Valve might come up with something in the future, but for now it’s just… barely an improvement in video quality from my PCVR headset from like 8 years ago.
I hope China enters the VR competition
And it’s all proprietary walled garden. I have no interest in VR if it’s not free/libre.
I’m really sad VR went the way it did over the past decade. I was blown away with the simplicity and affordability of it when Google Cardboard launched. The standalone VR devices of today could have been just our current phones put inside head mounted brackets: easily available to most of us for cheap.
Besides gaming, VR has loads of cool educational uses. I find myself repeatedly going back to Google Earth VR on my Vive just to explore (both in 3D and street view mode) random places that I might never visit in real life.
Meta ruined it. Just poisoned the entire industry. Short of Valve stepping back into the ring, I see the tech shriveling until Apple glasses finally launches in 2099.
in my opinion the market is too segmented. Facebook took Oculus and refocused them onto standalone vr instead of pcvr, and secluded away a bunch of releases as Oculus exclusives. psvr is in a similar state. there isn’t enough vr software being made to support two separate walled gardens plus steamvr. in their rush to establish a vr monopoly, Facebook killed it. that’s my opinion
I’ll be hanging onto my vive cosmos for occasional games of beat saber but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty
Quest 3 is relatively affordable and provides excellent pcvr experience.
There really aren’t and have never been any such offerings in this price level, and wireless is an absolute game changer.The fact that most people use it as standalone is understandable. It’s like pc vs a console - regular people just want to press power and go.
but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty
Always has been. I went to demonstrations of this tech in the nineties when I was in college. It was going to be the next big thing. That never happened. It seems to come back every few years and then fade out again.
It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.
Yeah, when I had some extra money I considered getting VR but ultimately decided that it would be a waste & I’d only use it for 1-2 games then never tough it again.
that’s terrifying. fuck Facebook. so mad that they took oculus from us
I don‘t know about that. That Oculus founder seems worse than Suckerberg somehow.
However I still think that somehow Facebook‘s dominance bottlenecks the VR industry right now. Their little data extractors are ironically too cheap for a healthy and vibrant VR economy, keeping competition and ideas out that the industry needs so desperately.
Plus the early adopters are not going to be lay-people, they are going to be tech enthusiests and people who know what they are shopping for. Having Meta and their data harvesting gadgets all over your home is something they would be very concious of, and in my case, avoid entirely for that reason.
The outcome, is dispite the lower cost to get a VR headset, a lot of people still havent entered the space yet, due to the security concerns and refusal to accept the data collection terms of more afordable devices.
Years after the initial releases VR still very much feels like a solution looking for a problem. As long as the industry doesn’t figure out why it should even exist there will likely just be a slow decline and there is no chance for growth.
I respect palmer luckey for what he as done for VR and what he still does. Yea i’m not a fan of the defence contracts but even there he did some cool stuff.
Is the Valve Index really that unpopular? Or is it not included in the list for some reason?
The Index is pretty old and expensive. I’d love to have it, but there are also third-party headsets that are Index-compatible that are quite impressive.
Also they never sold it in many countries.
Not showing the “Other” percentage on the graph is extremely misleading.
It probably doesnt show the percentage if its 2%. I dont think that little of a portion would make the graph extremely misleading
I kinda find it shocking apple did have 9% of the new shipments at some point.
Sadly there isn’t even any company I could see making a dent in this in the near future. The Pico did something but not enough and Valve’s new headset will be too expensive to get a major %
if Valve can get it working with the steamdeck… oh man that could be pretty awesome
The new headset will be standalone as far as we know so it’ll run games on its own like the quest does!
oh even better
I’m hoping the google XR OS will make the number of affordable headsets rise and new companies getting in the VR market.
