Megatrend Analysis of the XR industry

Introduction

In order to shed light on the footsteps of the XR device industry, which is gradually increasing in scale with the goal of replacing wearable devices and IT devices, and to forecast the future market, XR device models and specifications released from 2018 to the first half of 2023 were analyzed. During this period, there were 327 models of XR devices and 127 companies that were investigated.

XR devices are classified into VR, MR, and AR. As for AR devices, only optical see-through (OST) products were classified as AR, and video see-through (VST), which allows viewing of the real world through a camera, were classified as MR. Since the labeling methods for MR and VR devices were mixed by the company, the fixing method was also closely investigated and referred to the device classification.

In order to analyze the trend of XR devices, it was analyzed by dividing into three types by period.
1) Latest trends of products released only in the first half of 2023
2) Overall XR device flow through analysis of products released from 1989 to 2022
3) 5-year trend between 2018 and 2022 for an accurate analysis of the current status, taking into account the company’s mergers and acquisitions, closure, etc.

Analyzing the number of models released between 1989 and 2022 by device, the XR device industry appears to have started to bloom in 2016. Most of the device models were for VR, but after the number of models released peaked in 2017, the number of new VR device models has been slowly declining. Especially since 2020 when Covid-19 started, the number of AR device models has outpaced the number of VR device models. One of the reasons for the decrease in the number of newly released VR device models is the increase in the number of MR device models. From this analysis, it seems that the XR device industry is shifting from VR to AR and MR industries from 2021.

The competitiveness of each country in the XR device industry was also analyzed. Recently, the device industry has been affected by the entire supply chain depending on the ecosystem of each country, so we looked at the countries and application fields that are leading the XR set industry. Between 2018 and 2022, the country with the highest number of vendors launching XR devices was China, with 25 vendors. The United States comes next with 20 companies, and Korea has the third largest number with 9 companies. As a result of investigating the number of companies by application field, Chinese companies have the largest number of companies that have released VR and MR products, but the number of AR companies is the number one in the United States. South Korea ranked third in AR and VR products respectively.

When analyzing the number of XR device product models, China ranked first, the US ranked second, and Taiwan ranked third.

We analyzed software companies for XR between 2010 and 2022, as well as their released products and applications. The number of software released during this period was 472, and the number of companies was 178. The increase in the number of software releases for XR started from 2016, and when 472 software were analyzed by XR type, the ratio was 66% with 311 cases for VR, and 81 cases and 80 cases for AR and VR, respectively. VR software still seems to dominate the XR software industry.

When XR type software was analyzed by country, China released the most products for VR with 177 cases. This result shows that China is leading the VR software industry. As a result of analysis by genre, game use accounted for 49% with 233 cases, industrial use with 62 cases with 13%, and entertainment with 41 cases with 9%.

When the number of software companies is analyzed by country, US companies have an overwhelming number of companies with 79. On the other hand, China, which has the most VR software releases, had only 12 companies.