Virtual reality hasn’t caught on with American teens, according to a new survey from Piper Sandler released this week.
While 29% percent of teens polled owned a VR device — versus 87% who own iPhones — only 4% of headset owners used it daily, and just 14% used them weekly.
Teenagers also didn’t seem that interested in buying forthcoming VR headsets either. Only 7% said they planned to purchase a headset, versus 52% of teens polled who were unsure or uninterested.
Apple is rumoured to be looking to launch a mixed reality AR/VR headset later this year, but priced at around $3000, it is thought to be aimed more at developers and professionals in AR/VR and could serve more as a way to augment the Mac screen. This could, says Piper Sandler, help it build a case for AR/VR with devs that could then lead to more compelling consumer products.
By contrast, Meta, has cut the price of its Quest 2 and VRPro headsets to more like the $500 mark in attempt to entice more users into its metaverse world – a division of Meta that lost $13.7bn last year.
“This survey only further exemplifies that the current state of VR is very business-focused,” said Rolf Illenberger, Managing Director of VRdirect, a company that provides enterprise software solutions for the metaverse and virtual reality. “The pandemic further accelerated progress for VR and AR useability in the office, while the release of new devices will mean more for developers building practical use cases than they will for teenagers seeking entertainment.”
VRdirect has helped bring some of the biggest companies on the planet — like Porsche, Nestle and Siemens into VR and the metaverse — and advised several others in the process. The company’s easy-to-use software makes building virtual reality environments a breeze — to the point where anyone in the company use and leverage it.
