THE virtual reality market will have its first billion-dollar year in 2016 as technologies catch up with the public's appetite to escape the 'here and now'.
Business advisory firm Deloitte, which employs 400 staff in Northern Ireland and recently introduced gaming technology to its own recruitment process, has predicted the VR market will be dominated by video games with 2.5 million sales of VR headsets alone.
"The notion of virtual reality is decades old, but, as with many technologies, its commercial potential has yet to be fully realised," Dr Danny McConnell, technology partner at Deloitte in Belfast, said while launching the company's 16th TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) Predictions for 2016.
"Virtual reality is likely to have applications for both consumer and enterprise, but this year we expect the majority of commercial activity to focus on video games. Companies considering using VR should be aware of the hardware cost and the slim content that is currently available."
The escalation of commercial interest in VR is just one of the surges outlined in the annual forecast, with the company also predicting 'mobile-first' strategies to dominate and photos and videos to replace the spoken word.
"Over 90 percent of photos will be taken using a smartphone and we expect 1.6 billion smartphones to be sold in total this year - around 23 times the peak sales of film cameras (70 million in 1999) and 13 times the peak for digital cameras (120 million in 2010)," Dr McConnell added.
"We anticipate that 2.5 trillion photos will be shared or stored online globally this year - a 15 per cent increase from last year - and about three quarters of this total will likely be shared and the remainder backed up online.
"The expected network impact of this will be about 3.5 exabytes (the equivalent of 3.5 billion gigabytes), representing a 20 per cent increase from 2015."
Touch mobile commerce is also poised to accelerate the mobile checkout and will be used by a potential 50 million consumers by the end of the year.
