PS VR shipments reached 429k in Q1, taking 18.8% of total shipments – IRC

Total worldwide shipments of VR and augmented reality headsets reached 2.3m in Q1, according to the latest data from IDC (via SeekingAlpha), with VR headsets representing over 98 per cent of those sales.

Around 1.53m headsets were mobile headsets, including Samsung’s Gear VR, Google’s Daydream View, and TCL’s Alcatel VR, with the other 0.77m made up by PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

As we’ve seen from other analysts, Samsung’s Gear VR is still the most popular headset of the lot with 489,500 shipments in Q1, representing 21.5 per cent of Q1’s total shipments, but Sony’s PlayStation VR wasn’t far behind at 429,000 shipments (18.8 per cent).

That might not sound particularly large in the grand scheme of things, but that’s still a significant number of active users for publishers thinking about which VR platform to support. Indeed, Oculus Rift and Vive shipments were a long way behind PlayStation VR in IDC’s report, with Vive shifting 190,900 units (8.4 per cent) and the Rift 993,000 units (4.4 per cent).

In March, IDC estimated that the worldwide AR and VR headset market would grow at a compound annual rate of 58 per cent, reaching 99.4m units in 2021. This year, it expects the market to hit just over 20m units.

With only 2.3m units shipped in Q1, that’s still quite a long way to go before the end of the year, but with more Google Daydream headsets due to arrive later this year from major smartphone manufacturers, we wouldn’t be surprised if the market experienced a last-minute surge come Christmas time.