According to the latest ReportLinker online survey of 728 respondents who were interviewed between December 30th and January 2nd, awareness about virtual reality is on the rise in the U.S. Many more Americans than ever before now say that they have a positive attitude towards the emerging new technology. While 83% of all respondents in the latest survey said they felt generally positive about VR, just around 72% of all surveyed expressed the same sentiment in the previous survey which was conducted last September. Just 17% of respondents in the latest survey said that they held a negative view of virtual reality, as opposed to 28% respondents in the earlier study. What more, 31% of respondents said that they were ‘very familiar’ with the technology, which is a figure that has nearly doubled since last September, when just 16% admitted to knowing the technology very well.
What must be music to the ears of industry insiders is that the 11% jump in positive attitude towards the technology is not based on hearsay, word-of-the-mouth publicity or just high-voltage promotions in the media. The number of people who say that they have experienced VR first hand have shot up by 20 percentage points over the past few months, which may be somewhat indicative of the growing awareness about virtual reality among mainstream consumers. When asked about which companies and which devices come to mind when thinking about VR, Samsung came out on top, with a whopping 58% of respondents claiming to have heard of the company’s mobile-based VR headset – Gear VR. The Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard are also apparently fairly well-known, with 31% and 32% naming those two platforms respectively.
While most of the findings of the study are along expected lines, for the most part, there’s one little thing that seems fairly surprising. According to the study, older generations are apparently more enthusiastic today about the technology than millennials, who were the early adopters and are believed to have kicked off the craze for all things VR in the first place. A whopping 84% of respondents who claimed to be Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers, expressed their appreciation for virtual reality as opposed to just 68% of the same demographics last September.
