TrendForce Expects Hardware Advances to Drive VR Market and Wireless VR Headsets to Arrive After 2017

Virtual reality (VR) has made significant progress in the consumer market as major technology companies roll out competing products. According to the global market research firm TrendForce, the 9 million out of the estimated 105 million units wearable devices shipped this year will be VR-based products. Gaming has emerged as the first major consumer application for the VR technology, said TrendForce analyst Ariel Chen. VR devices require the support of advanced hardware to deliver new and original gaming experience. Chen further listed three main hardware specifications that will be crucial to the development of VR products – GPU power, wireless communication speed and sensor data processing capability.

Efficient GPUs are needed to raise the levels of details and comfort in virtual environments 

An extremely high level of graphics and arithmetic computing power is a prerequisite for the realization of VR. This makes GPU the most essential component in a VR device as it determines the quality of real-time rendering. Frame latency, which can cause dizziness in wearer of VR headsets, has become a pressing problem that needs to be dealt with. Chen said a powerful GPU, together with a display featuring a high refresh rate, can effectively reduce latency down to less than 20 millisecond and make the VR experience much more comfortable for consumers. Overall, the GPU architecture and related hardware specifications will be important benchmarks for visual effects and the quality of user experiences in VR gaming.

Wireless VR headsets to arrive after the maturation of 802.11ad solutions

Chen also noted that IEEE 802.11ad, a Wi-Fi standard that aims to provide multi-gigabit wireless data transfer, will likely play a major role in the development of wireless VR headsets in the future. For VR applications, the 802.11ad standard would meet the bandwidth requirement, but it still produces a frame latency of 100 milliseconds or more. TrendForce anticipates wireless VR headsets to appear on the market after 2017, when the 802.11ad standard advances beyond its current R&D phase. Recently, U.S.-based chip vendor Nitero announced that the company will launch a VR product that can transfer data on the 60GHz band in the second half of this year. Device developers will be looking closely at this new product’s ability to reduce frame latency.

VR device depends on a vast sensor network and a tight integration of hardware and software

Sensors responsible for VR experience are broadly split into two types – position and motion sensors. Position sensors are mainly based on the infrared light technology, while motion sensors can be further divided into accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers. Chen said that the complex interactions between a VR device and its user depend on the efficient teamwork between the sensors and the backend software. The former collect the input data while the latter processes them. When deciding on the amount of sensors that will be on a VR device, hardware makers would have to think about ways that would maximize the collection of input data while avoiding an overload of conflicting information caused by having too many sensors.