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Like many analyst firms, market sizing is one of the ongoing practices of AR Insider’s research arm, ARtillery Intelligence. A few times per year, it goes into isolation and buries itself deep in financial modeling. One such exercise zeroes in on VR revenues.
This is one of the subdivisions of spatial computing – others include mobile AR and headworn AR. They’re all related and share technological underpinnings, but are driven by separate market forces such as their respective hardware bases (see methodology and inclusions).
So what did the VR forecast uncover? At a high level, Global VR revenue is projected to grow from $12.2 billion in 2024 to $18.9 billion in 2029, a 9.12 percent compound annual growth rate. This sum consists of consumer and enterprise spending and their revenue subsegments.
Drilling down, our latest Behind the Numbers installment breaks down the enterprise-spending subset of the above figures. What are enterprises spending on VR? We’re talking about both headsets and the experiences that run on those headsets, such as immersive training.
Bits Versus Atoms
Enterprise VR spending is projected to grow from $7.07 billion in 2024 to $10.43 billion in 2029, an 8.08 percent compound annual growth rate. This includes VR headsets themselves, as well as end-user apps and other enablement tools such as device management programs.
As for areas of applicability and use cases, we’re talking about VR-driven productivity and guidance. But with live guidance, VR is less fitting to industrial settings (e.g., assembly & maintenance) than corporate (e.g., design collaboration). The former is where AR often applies.
But regardless of the environment or enterprise persona, the biggest opportunity is in VR’s growing alignment and application in immersive training. There, the technology’s sensory immersion can boost memory recall, while offering cost-efficient alternatives to physical training.
For example, there are cost savings involved in remote immersive training versus traditional methods that involve travel and other hard costs. It’s all about deploying bits versus atoms. VR training also scales, given the technology’s broad applicability across enterprise verticals.
Recurring & Predictable
Those vertical-specific deployments so far have been strong in retail, such as simulating crisis-prevention scenarios. And the full list of verticals continues to grow as VR training finds traction in everything from banking and customer service to industrial warehousing work.
In most of these deployments, Enterprise VR software follows pricing dynamics of the broader enterprise software world, including SaaS models. In that sense, enterprise VR software players inherit the benefits of SaaS, including revenue that’s recurring and predictable.
Software also exceeds hardware spending in enterprise VR as buying cycles outpace the ever-lengthening VR hardware replacement cycle (3-5 years). Additionally, large-scale VR training programs often involve shared hardware, but per-user software licenses.
As for hardware, enterprise VR is led by Meta Quest (all variants) but has also gotten a boost from Apple Vision Pro. Due to its price tag, early buyers have been enterprises and developers. The price tag also means an aggregate impact in dollars – an estimated $1.12 billion in 2025.
We’ll pause there and circle back in the next Behind the Numbers installment with more numbers & narratives. Meanwhile, check out the full report.