The Venture Reality Fund said it is tracking over 550 companies on the virtual reality landscape.
The major growth areas for investment in VR were gaming, location-based entertainment (LBE), next-generation reality capture, enterprise, and healthcare.
One of the bigger funding deals in the beginning of the year was for LBE company Sandbox VR. While IMAX shut down their VR efforts, others like Cinemark and Spaces are launching in the market with LBE locations at movie theaters.
In healthcare the VR Fund saw continued interest in training with funding for GibLib, Fundamental VR, Precision OS and others as well as investments in treatment with Proprio and Oxford VR and more. Next-generation reality capture is especially notable since it unlocks new experiences for both VR and AR and shows the industry moving past 360 video.
Consumer VR is really heating up, with not only the launch of Oculus Quest at the end of the month but also VR HMDs like the Oculus Rift S and the Valve Index addressing the pro-sumer market with noticeable improvements over the previous generation. Sony also announced they sold over 4.2 million PlayStation VR and Nintendo jumped into VR with their Labo VR and VR integration into their flagship properties of Mario and Zelda.
Indie developers are finding big success in VR with Beat Saber being the first VR title to sell over one million copies (for over $20 million revenue) in under a year which is similar to how Angry Birds and others were able to find early success on the emerging smartphone platform.
Companies like Superhot Team announced they have made more revenue in VR than for their non-VR title, which was already considered a success. That further validates VR’s opportunity for developers.
Enterprise VR is also gaining ground in big ways, with high-end offerings from Varjo, HP, and HTC Vive providing a lot more features and functionality than the new consumer spec head-mounted displays. Also Oculus is getting more serious about the enterprise as well, announcing enterprise bundles and services support coming in the fall.
There is plenty of big success stories for enterprise software in VR as well, not only with Strivr training over a million Walmart employees but also seeing companies like Gravity Sketch helping Ford design cars and Virtualitics helping data scientists at Kuehne+Nagel optimize supply chains and Cedar Sinai save lives.
Overall the beginning of 2019 is showing just how big VR is becoming and that after years of slow but steady adoption we are seeing strong indicators that we have reached a major inflection point and will see adoption at a much more accelerated pace thanks to the efforts of both large players like Facebook, HTC, and Sony but also the many startups out there winning fans and customers and making millions along the way.
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via https://www.aiupnow.com
Dean Takahashi, Khareem Sudlow
