AR/VR spending to reach $28.8 bn in Asia-Pacific in 2024: IDC

Commercial segment surpassed consumer AR/VR spending last year and will continue to account for a larger share of the spending

New Delhi: The IT spending on augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) is set to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47.7 per cent and reach $28.8 billion by 2024, according to a new report.

Commercial segment surpassed consumer AR/VR spending last year and will continue to account for a larger share of the spending, said IDC Worldwide Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide.

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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.

“The restrictions imposed due to the pandemic urged many organisations to rely on technologies to support their business processes/functions such as customer service, remote health, and minimised 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.

Education, with online virtual teaching turning out to be a more engaging experience for students. It is then closely followed by retail, and discrete manufacturing— the three industries encompass close to 50 per cent of the overall commercial sector in 2020.

Virtual reality games are 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 compound annual growth rate over the forecast (2019-2024),” the IDC said.

From the two reality types of perspective, spending in VR solutions will be greater than that of AR solutions initially.

“Though, strong growth in AR hardware, software, and services spending (118.0 per cent CAGR) will push overall AR spending well ahead of VR spending by the end of the forecast period 2019- 2024,” the report mentioned.

“Organizations need to develop a vision and devise a resilient strategy for deploying AR/VR as enablement tools to achieve strategic priorities,” said Deepan Pathy, Research Manager, Future of Work, AR/VR and Mobility research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

On a geographic basis, China market will represent the largest AR/VR spending in the Asia/Pacific region – with more than 90 per cent share in 2020.