If extended reality (XR) offerings – including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) – are to realize their full market potential, the organizations participating in this complex sector would benefit to double down on efforts to establish industry-wide open technical specifications and business conventions to integrate operations across the entire ecosystem.

As it stands today, the outlook for this market is already bright. According to new research by global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, nearly 40 million AR smart glasses will ship by 2027. The total augmented and mixed reality market will surpass $220 billion in the same year.

Strategy Analytics predicts a strong recovery for the global Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) markets in 2021 after COVID-driven contraction in 2020. This recovery is expected to be spurred on by a 6 fold increase in XR (the combination of AR and VR) shipments, recent consumer-friendly innovations to AR headsets, and the adoption of smartphone-tethered VR.

Sony has sold over three million Playstation VR (PSVR) headsets to date, making it the clear market leader in the premium/standalone VR platform sector over its HTC Vive and Oculus Rift competitors. These numbers are exactly in line with the hardware sales forecasts in Digi-Capital’s AR/VR/XR Analytics Platform.