The THETA is the largest platform for using a 360 camera API. I estimate over 1 million THETA cameras.
If you’re building a VR or AR application that uses the THETA, the largest market is the Smartphone.
In 2016, 70 million Smartphones capable of VR are expected to be sold.
On the headset side of the market:
- 6 million PlayStation VR
- 2.3 million HTC Vive
- 700k Oculus Rift
While the Oculus Rift is heavily hyped, the market opportunity is small. If you ship your product with the Oculus, then you don’t need to sell into the limited Oculus Rift market. For example, if you’re selling a kiosk for travel companies in New York to showcase vacation properties in Costa Rica or Hawaii, then you could bundle the kiosk with the Oculus Rift. This might be an especially effective system in the winter.
You could build a similar system for factory inspection or construction site inspection.
What you probably don’t want to do is build an application specific to the Oculus Rift and attempt to sell into the existing market of Oculus Rift users. A better strategy is to target the 70 million smartphones