ABI: VR seeing strong interest from US businesses

Virtual Reality (VR) is seeing strong interest from US businesses, particularly in the healthcare, retail, consumer packaged goods, and automotive and transportation sectors.

This is according to ABI Research, which found in a recent poll of US-based companies that 85% of firms are at least “in the stages of early investigation” into VR – even though only 4% of respondents had VR in operation.

Michael Inouye

ABI Research principal analyst, Michael Inouye, said that despite VR being a new technology, the survey produced some “surprisingly positive results for VR in enterprise and commercials spaces.”

“The B2B market will take longer to develop than the consumer space, but its expansion, at least in the US, could occur at a faster rate than we had previously estimated.”

Sam Rosen, managing director and vice-president at ABI Research, added: “We still expect the consumer segment of the VR market to hold the largest revenue share over the next five years, but eventually we anticipate the B2B opportunity will overtake the consumer space, especially if VR and related technologies do become the next compute platform.”

ABI’s research is based on a business-to-business technology survey of 455 US-based companies across nine vertical markets.