Asia/Pacific spending on augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) is expected to grow rapidly at a CAGR of 47.7% (2019-2024), reaching US$28.8 billion by 2024, according to IDC.
This growth is primarily driven by the AR/VR technology capabilities addressing the issues of different industries in current COVID-19 scenario and creating immense opportunities throughout the forecast, said IDC.
"The restrictions imposed due to the pandemic urged many organizations to rely on technologies to support their business processes/functions such as customer service, remote health, and minimized in-person meetings among others. With this, there was strong new demand across many industries for AR/VR technology in the market - especially in the second half of 2020," said Ritika Srivastava, associate market analyst at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Commercial segment surpassed consumer AR/VR spending last year and will continue to account for a larger share of the spending. However, consumer spending is also forecast to grow significantly with a CAGR of 43.2% during 2019-2024.
The industry that is leading the most projects/implementation in Asia/Pacific is education, with online virtual teaching turning out to be a more engaging experience for students, said IDC. It is then closely followed by retail and discrete manufacturing. The three industries accounted for close to 50% of the overall commercial sector in 2020.
VR games were a leading use case in 2020, with more than one-third of the overall AR/VR technology market being one of the top entertainment sources in 2020 - owing to the limitations of physical interaction due to pandemic. This is followed by training, and video/feature viewing (VR) use cases. However, emergency response and internal videography are the fastest growing use cases in terms of CAGR in the forecast period.
