VR industry players excited about China
SHANGHAI: Chen Jiuxiao puts on virtual reality (VR) goggles and is immediately transported to a snow-covered ski slope, down which she slaloms without ever leaving here.
“I felt weightless skiing down the mountain,” Chen, 25, gushes after re-emerging in the material world.
“The scenery around me was so authentic.”
Chen said she ventured into one of the city’s VR arcades due to word of mouth from her techsavvy friends.
China had an estimated 3,000 VR arcades in 2016, and the market was forecast to grow 13-fold between then and 2021 to amount to 5.25 billion yuan (RM3.2 billion), according to a joint report by iResearch Consulting Group and Greenlight Insights.
Add in the profits to be made from headsets, equipment, games and other products, and it’s little wonder that augmentedreality (AR) and VR industries are excited about China.
“Chinese growth in the next five years could see it dominate AR/VR long-term — and not by a small margin,” Silicon Valley consultancy Digi-Capital said in a report last year.
One key factor is China’s government.
Tens of millions of Chinese have become obsessive players of mobile video games, causing concern that China was raising a generation of myopic youngsters addicted to battle games.
Authorities imposed curbs last year on the number of new game releases and playing time for youths, rattling the industry and shaving billions off the market value of big players, including gaming giant Tencent.
But the government is pushing hard for China to become a world leader in next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. VR has been lumped into that favoured class, benefiting from a slew of preferential policies.
Firms, such as Tencent Alibaba and Baidu, are investing in virtual online shopping and VR entertainment, all of which could trickle down into gaming.
Already a number of towns and cities in China have declared themselves incubator zones that are integrating VR into research, manufacturing, education and other spheres, luring in capital, according to Chinese reports.
The expected wide-scale adoption in China of ultra-fast 5G networks is expected to further boost VR development.