A woman tries VR games in Beijing on August 27, 2016 in Beijing. (Photo by Song Jingli/chinadaily.com.cn)
As an emerging force in the technology sector, virtual reality (VR) has thrown the question of "to be or not to be" to many companies, and some early birds have sped up their adoption of the technology.
"One new VR content is released every day in the world, and as more and more high-quality content emerges, China's offline VR entertainment sector will witness a 10-year golden development period," said He Wenyi, CEO and founder of Beijing Leke VR Technology Co.
The post-80s founder of VR Le, a cloud platform that serves more than 1,000 offline VR experience stores in the country, defined this soon-to-come period as a VR-park era. VR park can refer to any venue that features VR entertainment, he said during an ecosystem forum his company hosted on August 27, and he compared the VR-park era he envisioned to the internet cafe boom at a time when personal computers were becoming popular. The country witnessed 1.5 billion internet cafes opening since 1995.
According to industry consultancy firm iResearch Consulting Group, this year, the Chinese VR market will exceed 5.6 billion yuan ($880 million) in revenue. That compares to 1.5 billion yuan in 2015. It also estimates that revenue is on track to break 55 billion yuan by 2020.
He revealed that 144 games on his platform have received 5.24 million paid clicks since data became available in September 2015 and attributed this tremendous growth to a VR chair that showed up last year, which became popular instantly, and to VR helmets, which were still in the lab in 2014 but matured quickly and hit the market in April and May this year.
VR experience venues are located in prime locations of first and second-tier cities where population traffic is high and are expanding to third and fourth-tier cites quickly, He further revealed.
Small VR parks of an area of 20 to 50 square meters take up 70 percent of the total while medium-sized venues of 50 to 300 square meters take up 25 percent, he said and added that those occupying an area of 300 to 1,000 square meters have also popped up, which may mean that the VR-park era might already be upon us.
Yang Xiangming, COO of Leke VR revealed that Leke was a content provider (CP) for the film industry at first and they tended to come up with a product with VR elements to see what VR might bring to the industry in April, 2015, but they found things were not as rosy as they first thought.
