HTC has pumped a lot of their effort into VR this past year or so, going all in with the Vive VR headset and continuing to work to expand the platform and the content that you can enjoy with it. While HTC is still very much a smartphone manufacturer, VR is quite clearly a big focus for them now, and like other companies in the industry as well as analysts, HTC is making some predictions about the state of VR’s future and what sort of content we can expect from VR in the future. According to HTC China’s regional President, Alvin Wang Graylin, VR will see its first big budget film released in 2017, while a VR MMORPG will happen sometime in 2018. These are of course, just predictions, and there is every possibility that they won’t come true, but the thought of them must surely excite the masses who are quite interested in VR technology.
Graylin, who recently spoke at Unity Vision Summit, has tweeted a series of slides from his talking points, some of which contain a handful of what he thinks will happen with VR in the next two years. In addition to the two mentioned above, both of which would be admittedly huge for the industry, Graylin predicts that the VR market will gain a massive amount of new titles, exceeding 10,000 across the entire industry and various VR platforms and devices.
For Mobile VR, which is quite a bit more accessible, not to mention affordable for the average consumer, Graylin expects unit sales to surpass 50 million next year, and with that kind of a number it’s clear that he believes VR is only going up at a decent pace and will be likely to continue doing so. He also believes that VR will see significant growth in large part due to education and that shouldn’t seem too far fetched given Samsung Germany’s work with Cornelsen in Berling for a VR Eduthon, as well as Google’s work with Cardboard Expeditions. While some of the predictions seem a little more probable, such as the big budget film, others could be quite the ambitious undertaking, such as the VRMMO as Graylin isn’t just predicting that it will launch by the end of 2018 but that it will also be a high-quality offering and that consumers will instantly rave over it. As for the film, studios like 20th Century Fox have already worked with AMD and Alienware for the recently released Assassin’s Creed VR experience that was put out to promote the Assassin’s Creed movie that hits this month, and even though it was only a minute and a half long, a major film studio having helped to produce it makes it much more likely that a big budget film in VR could be possible within a year’s time. If you’re interested in seeing the rest of Graylin’s predictions, you can view them on the slides from the gallery below.
