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At Samsung Electronic’s CES press event this week, American boss Tim Baxter has said there are more than five million Samsung Gear VR’s in people’s homes.
The headset launched in November 2015 and was the first of the current wave of virtual reality headsets to be available to the public in a finished form, and this mobile offering has been pushed by many outlets as one of the more accessible types of VR, requiring less of the set-up cost of the Gear’s bigger brother, the Oculus Rift, and its competitors. Indeed, Samsung and many retailers have been bundling the Samsung Gear VR with its various smartphones in an effort to introduce the mainstream to virtual reality.
This seems to have paid off recently, with Upload VR — who also broke this story — reporting that there were just 1m gear users back in May, which means that the last eight months have seen a big majority of the Gear’s sales, although Baxter hasn’t quantified which of the headsets were sold and which were given away in bundles.
Still, it’s the best we’ve got right now. Oculus haven’t revealed how many Rift headsets it’s sold, HTC have previously claimed 140,000 and Sony says that its PlayStation VR, which launched late to the party in October 2015, has sold "many hundreds of thousands" of units.
2017 is a big year for VR, and it’s heartening news that one platform has 5m units in the wild, regardless of how they got there.
