Industrial supporting facilities are dragging back VR helmets and explosive growth

The firm solutions for chips, platform products and hardware that are currently available on the market have difficulty keeping up with the growth of the virtual reality industry, which will affect helmet manufacturers to significantly increase shipments next year.

Industry sources were quoted as saying that major virtual reality hardware manufacturers (including Sony, HTC and Oculus, which are temporarily leading) will not see rapid growth next year because industry supporting facilities cannot keep up, such as high-resolution displays and high-performance processors and related supporting software and firmware.

Sources said that the chips, platform products and hardware solutions currently available on the market have difficulty keeping up with the growth of the virtual reality industry, which will affect helmet manufacturers to significantly increase shipments next year.

It is said that due to various upstream supply chain factors, the vast majority of virtual reality helmet manufacturers have not yet announced their shipment targets for next year.

Sources also pointed out that this year, some manufacturers have experienced a bump in helmet delivery due to a shortage of OLED displays and some sensor components.

Among the three major manufacturers, Oculus was the first to release a virtual reality helmet. It initially set a delivery date of March 28, but the company encountered a shortage of parts and components, resulting in multiple ticket cancellations. Company executives publicly apologized and introduced compensation measures with free shipping.

According to an earlier report by the Electronic Times, HTC, which sells Vive helmets, is expected to ship between 450,000 and 500,000 units this year, while next year's shipments may be only up to 600,000 units.

According to forecasts from technology market research firm TrendForce, Sony in Japan is expected to sell 1.5 million PS VR headsets this year, and shipments next year are expected to reach 2.5 million units.

In addition, Facebook's Oculus company may ship 650,000 units this year and may reach 1.2 million units next year.

It should be pointed out that in addition to the above-mentioned three full-featured helmet developers in the virtual reality hardware market, there are also a large number of smartphone manufacturers that have launched cheap helmets that are used with mobile phones. These helmets rely on smartphones to run related virtual reality content and obtain Entry-level virtual reality experience, but the playability is far less than full-featured helmets.

The global sales data of this year's simple "smartphone virtual reality helmets" are still unknown.

In addition, the current full-function helmet requires cables to connect to high-end gaming computers, which is awkward to use. According to reports, companies such as Google and Oculus have begun to develop integrated virtual reality helmets. The helmet will have a built-in high-performance computer that can run virtual reality games. By then, the constraints faced by players will be greatly reduced. However, relevant manufacturers have not announced the launch schedule of the integrated virtual reality helmet.

Editor: yvonne