Survey: Nearly 80% of VR/AR/MR devs are making games

This month Virtual Reality Developers Conference officials released the second annual VRDC VR/AR Innovation Report, a cornucopia of insights from professionals involved in the development of virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences.

If you're working in VR/AR/MR (or even just thinking about it) this report offers you some useful perspective on the rapidly-expanding, diverse and hard-to-measure VR/AR/MR industry - from sustainability of the market, to practical challenges, platform popularity, funding and more!

For more information and to check out the full report, download it for free here!

To give you a taste of what's inside the full report, today we'd like to take the liberty of highlighting an especially striking finding about how big of a role game development plays in the burgeoning VR/AR/MR industry.

The answer, it turns out, is pretty big. When we asked our 600+ survey respondents about the focus or focuses of their current or potential work in VR/AR/MR development, the majority (78 percent) said Games/Entertainment.

The second most popular response proved to be Training/Education, which was selected by 27 percent of respondents. Branded Experiences took third, with 19 percent of respondents saying such productions (think: car showrooms or vacation hotspots, rendered in VR) were focuses of their work.

This isn't terribly surprising given that the leading VR platforms (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR) were initially sold as platforms for games. Still, it's interesting to see that the second most popular project type isn't design or branding, but education and training.

More details about what VR/AR devs are up to, including which headsets they're developing for and where their funding is coming from, is freely available within the full report.

This year's report comes in advance of the next highly anticipated standalone VRDC event, VRDC Fall 2017, which will take place in San Francisco from September 21-22, 2017 and will bring together creators of immersive experiences of all kinds—including games, entertainment, brand experience, healthcare, training, design, and more.

For more information on VRDC Fall 2017, visit the show's official website and subscribe to regular updates via Twitter and Facebook.

Gamasutra, VRDC and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.