The 7 Drivers Of The $150B AR/VR Industry

TECH CRUNCH - Jul 8 - AR and VR share some common drivers that will shape their future, but the problems they solve are different.

Mobility: AR needs untethered platforms, all day battery life, and mobile quality of service for voice and data. Mobility isn’t that big a deal for VR, although it’s a big plus for mobile VR.
Vision: The critical elements are field of view, depth of focus/depth of field, vision correction, image resolution, and luminosity/viewability.
Immersion: The keys to immersion are position tracking (spatial and rotational), jitter, object stability, audio quality, and audio tracking (stereo vs 3D).
Usability: Processing power (a tradeoff with battery life for AR and host platform cost for VR), user comfort (motion sickness for VR and weight for AR), and user input controls (controller, hand/body, eye, voice, user position, environment).
Flexibility: Cross-platform operating systems and SDKs for AR and VR make developers’ lives a lot easier. Mixed Reality holds even greater promise by providing the ability to switch easily between AR and VR on the same device.
Wearability: Design style and comfort top of the list. AR faces greater challenges than VR because of its usage on the street, with tradeoffs between size, weight and power dependent on battery life and efficient CPUs and GPUs.
Affordability: Immersive VR must follow the path trodden by PCs and consoles to reach a mass audience. Ambient VR needs to be even less expensive AR players should be talking to the telcos now, because there’s a lot of educating to do.