Trendwatch: Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream

Thu, November 21, 2024

Topic:

Author:

Anne Corning

Virtual Reality (VR) is booming. Currently an estimated $22.4 billion market, it’s predicted to grow by 42% CAGR reaching more than $131 billion in revenue by 2029.¹ In 2023, 10.8 million VR devices were sold.²

One key factor driving this explosive growth is VR’s effectiveness as an educational tool—its being used for everything from virtual elementary school field trips to military flight simulation to medical training.

Examples of VR applications in the medical & healthcare industry alone demonstrate the wide array of use cases for the immersive technology.

Since the pandemic, VR is also being used extensively in enterprise settings for remote collaboration, meetings, product design, and virtual events. Advancements in VR device design, optics, and display technology are helping to support widespread adoption by enabling more comfortable and affordable headsets, better quality visuals, and smoother integration with sensors for gesture tracking. On the consumer side, VR gaming and entertainment applications continue to grow, and retailers have hopped on board with a range of VR shopping features and tools.

VR Optics Landscape

To support ongoing VR adoption, headset makers continue to develop new headset designs, displays, and optical architectures. Users value both comfort and high-quality visuals. To address these considerations, a wide varity of current and emerging optical approaches are being tried. An ideal lens—the "holy grail" of VR optics—would offer a combination of:

User comfort (including light weight, not bulky)
FOV to match human vision for an immersive experience
Image clarity across the FOV
Minimize vergence-accommodation conflict
Energy efficiency
Light efficiency
Low cost

(Image source: IDTechEx)

Some of the VR optics in use today and under consideration include: Fixed-focus optics such as Fresnel and pancake lenses and foveated (variable focus) optical components such as liquid lenses and Alvarez lenses. But every optical approach offers different advantages and shortfalls. And every optical system, display, and device requires a quality measurement approach to match. Learn more about optical system considerations and VR display metrology in the recent Webinar: Latest Advancements in Virtual Reality Display Optics and Quality (free registration required).

In it, Radiant's Director of Optics and Software Engineering will explain the current and emerging VR optical architectures and discuss the latest approaches and methods for addressing VR display quality with the wide variety of FOVs, device form factors, and optical designs on the market. He'll cover image quality issues such as distortion and present methods of measuring focus with accurate modulation transfer function (MTF) techniques.