Education Policy, Business and Technology

Report: VR and AR Headsets to See 50% Growth Every Year Through 2021

THE Journal: Global shipments of augmented reality and virtual reality headsets will hit 13.7 million units this year as they ride a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56.1 percent on their way to 81.2 million shipments in 2021, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. (IDC).

VR headsets will account for 90 percent of those sales, and AR will account for the rest until 2019, with AR headsets experiencing exponential growth in the final two years of the forecast to capture a quarter of the market in 2021.

"AR headset shipments today are a fraction of where we expect them to be in the next five years, both in terms of volume and functionality," said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers, in a prepared statement. "AR headsets are also on track to account for over $30 billion in revenue by 2021, almost twice that of VR, as most of the AR headsets will carry much higher average selling prices with earlier adopters being the commercial segment. Meanwhile, most consumers will experience AR on mobile devices, although it's only a matter of time before Apple's ARKit- and Google's ARCore-enabled apps make their way into consumer grade headsets."

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