Funding for VR and AR Drops Precipitously in First Quarter of 2017
VR funding has fallen by 80 percent compared to Q1 2016.
Startups offering virtual reality and augmented reality products have raised significantly less funding in the first quarter of 2017, according to a report published on Crunchbase. Twenty-six companies raised a total of $200 million this quarter. That sounds fantastic, until you compare it with fundraising results one year ago in Q1 of 2016 when 29 companies drummed up over $1 billion.
Crunchbase also pointed out that Q1 of 2017 saw "the lowest quarterly number of financings and investment total in over a year."
To be fair, the lion's share of funds raised for VR this time last year came from an $800 million burst of financing for VR developer Magic Leap. That round of investment carried four times the weight of any other funding for VR.
Image courtesy of Crunchbase.
The long and short of it is that VR isn't dead yet, but it's not exactly spritely, either. What's the problem? Several factors, the elephant in the room of which is the nascence of virtual reality. Consumer interest is low, leading Facebook to shutter hundreds of Oculus Rift demo stations at Best Buy stores earlier this year. Magic Leap has taken a beating from reports that its super-duper VR tech is much farther away from completion than it let on around the time it received financing.
More affordable headsets such as PlayStation VR and Samsung Gear VR fared better than the considerably pricier Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. Still, the uproar around VR fell from a deafening roar to a deafening silence rather quickly. Facebook attempted to fill that void earlier this week during its F8 conference, where it devoted much of its time to VR-related announcements.
For now, however, both consumers and investors seem to be waiting to see what comes next. That could lead to a catch-22 where consumers clamor for apps and advancements in headset tech that fail to materialize because investors are waiting for interest in the medium to reignite.
Image courtesy of Famitsu magazine.
-
Shacknews
replyDavid Craddock posted a new article, Funding for VR and AR Drops Precipitously in First Quarter of 2017
-
The hype is calming down. The tech will continue to move forward regardless.
-
-
[deleted]
-
-
Like the Kinect
-
Like curved swords. Curved. Swords.
-
Hockey sticks.
-
-
-
Sounds like it's pretty much flat if you discount the Magic Leap investment.
-
From the Crunchbase article:
"What Changed?
We can’t assert with great confidence that slow VR uptake among early adopters is dampening investor enthusiasm. The space is small enough that fairly random quarterly fluctuations, such as a late-stage company closing a round a couple months later than expected, can move the needle on investment totals. The massive Series C round for Magic Leap last January was also a uniquely large round for the space, and it is not likely it will be repeated. Additionally, it should be noted that 2016 funding for VR was unusually high overall, by both round count and investment totals, dwarfing prior years."
-
-
Tech isn't there for what is being paid out. Yes we get a cool innovative way to interact with games and for certain genres that's great, but I still haven't seen anything exciting or taking advantage of the headset.
Additionally, the goggles have to compete with sweet monitors / 4k TVs visually, and they don't yet.
So what you are left with is people paying a premium on tech to get a unique interface that isn't really taken advantage of outside of a few specific genres, with diminished visual fidelity and cumbersome wires.
Improve the screens to be more competitive with other displays, make the thing wireless somehow, all while bringing down the price, and it might stand a chance. I assume the tech will eventually get there, and that will likely be the product to get excited for.-
It's doing alright.
-
-
This doesn't surprise me in the least. The market is being flooded with shit headsets.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=vr+headsets
Pretty much all of the companies outside of Oculus and Valve struck me as "me too" jump on the bandwagon give me all your money investors. Then you have Microsoft on the AR front, and they have always been incredible flaky when it comes to hardware.
-
-
-
