Lots of investments and movement is happening in the virtual reality landscape. This map from VentureBeat profiles outlines pretty nicely the key player on infrastructure, VR tools and platform, and the applications and content studios that are creating the 360 immersive virtual reality content. Let's dive into the heart of AR platforms that users are experiencing today for virtual reality. The most used one comes from Google. It's called Google Cardboard and, yes, it is really cardboard. Google Cardboard is a virtual reality platform developed by Google for use with a head mount for a smartphone. Named for its fold-out cardboard viewer, the platform is intended as a low-cost system to encourage interest in development in VR applications. Users can either build their own, or they can order it on the Internet from a variety of suppliers with very cheap components to create an experience virtual reality often for the first time. Other viewer experiences include, for example, the Samsung Gear VR. Samsung introduced the Gear VR in October 2014, co-developed with Oculus. The Gear VR can host specific mobile device, usually from Samsung, for providing both augmented and virtual reality experiences for the users. It also comes with a control interface. For Google and its partners, moving also beyond the Google Cardboard with Android Virtual Reality. Google has announced eight hardware partners that will make called Daydream phones, including Samsung, HTC, LG, Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE, Asus and Alcatel. Oculus was bought by a company you probably have heard about, Facebook. Facebook bought Oculus and developed something that is called the Oculus Rift and is very closely linked with 360 experience that Facebook is going to provide to their community. On the high end of the experience spectrum today is the HTC Vive. It was developed by HTC and the Valve Corporation. The headset itself uses a room-scale tracking technology that allows three-dimensional movements in three-dimensional rooms. It is often also used for entertainment experiences we are going to talk about later. Moving from VR to AR, you probably have heard about Google Glass, optical head-mounted display designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses. Originally launched in 2013, it was really trying to be a consumer-focused device, but if you go on the Internet, you'll find a lot of stories about people not liking the experiences being filmed, calling people the glass holds. But having said that, Google hasn't stopped that development. With the Enterprise Edition in 2017, the glass module is decoupled entirely from the frames. So meaning it can work with all kinds of existing eyewear or protective headgear. You can even attach it to industrial safety glasses or to a chemist's goggles for example. The big player in the augmented reality space is Microsoft. With their focus on driving communication and collaboration through augmented reality, they created the HoloLens. It's this first self-contained holographic computer. It doesn't need to be attached to another device or computing device. It provides the complete experience in this one unit. It allows you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you. Microsoft thinks that transforming how you communicate and create and communicate and explore and we will look at some very interesting scenarios from research, science, manufacturing in one of the next sessions. So what does the market look like for VR and AR headsets? Based on IDC, about 2.3 million virtual and augmented reality has been shipped over in the first quarter of 2017 alone. Important to understand, VR represents more than 98 percent of those headsets. So, definitely, VR is the key driver of the hardware market today, but we will look into what is likely going to change in the near future. How aware are the usual users about the VR offerings? While adoption is relatively low for VR and AR devices today, the awareness of them has nearly doubled over the last year. Now, 51 percent of the US population are aware of VR devices, and most of them have heard about names like Samsung Gear, the Sony PlayStation VR or the Oculus Rift. With all these devices out there, which one have you tried? One augmented reality experience you probably already had is delivered beyond the headsets but just with a smartphone. While AR headsets sold a year over a shipment growth of 77.4 percent, the vast majority of consumers experienced their first AR environment on the screen of their smartphones. Like many people, you probably also have tried Pokemon Go and AR experience. AR is not only an in-home experience. It is really a mobile experience. Making it mobile-friendly just as websites must be responsive, VR and AR must work for mobile. Goldman Sachs Research predicts that AR and VR have the potential to be the next big computing platform. But they must leverage mobile to achieve that. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, put it quite nicely. He said, "The phone is probably going to be the mainstream consumer platform, where a lot of these augmented reality features are becoming mainstream." Thank you for getting clear on virtual reality, augmented reality and the mixed realities in between. You are now familiar with the key devices our customers and clients are using today, virtual reality, augmented reality and the mixed reality continuum, as well as name uncategorized the key VR and AR hardware products and how they can be used.
