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What will happen to mobile VR in 2017?

Dave Ranyard has a few thoughts

What will happen to mobile VR in 2017?

At Pocket Gamer Connects London 2017, Dave Ranyard, CEO of Dream Reality Interactive, gave a talk on what we can expect to happen in VR for 2017.

He started by saying that the industry had "settled on three buckets", namely PC VR, console VR, and mobile VR, which all provide different experiences and have had different levels of success.

That said, "there's no winners yet," as there's still a high level of entry for consumers, and there's still no standard set of features between the different pieces of hardware.

"The weight of opinion believes that VR will be mainstream," he added, but there's still no idea of when this will happen.

Moving into 2017, Ranyard referred to it as the "January hangover", as the market and investors start to reconsider where VR stands and be more realistic about expectations.

As to what technology the mobile VR market can expect to see, Ranyard anticipated a motion controller for Gear VR, 3rd party Daydream devices becoming more prevalent, and positional tracking being added into the technology to start powering it up to be closer to PC models.

Interestingly, he claimed that King will lead the march on VR games on mobile with a target to launch in 2018/2019 as the mobile VR market starts to become more mainstream.

"I think this year the question will change from 'when' to 'how'", he concluded, saying that we already know that the technology is there, we just don't know how it will manifest.


Editor

Ric is the Editor of PocketGamer.biz, having started out as a Staff Writer on the site back in 2015. He received an honourable mention in both the MCV and Develop 30 Under 30 lists in 2016 and refuses to let anyone forget about it.