The attractiveness of virtual reality can’t be dismissed. The budding market has piqued the interest of some of the world’s most famed tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Sony, each of which have committed to developing their own headset.
Despite this, the public still isn’t very familiar with the technology. Thirty-one percent of the U.S. consumers who participated in a 2015 survey pertaining to virtual reality said that they had never heard of any form of headset. The study, which was conducted by statistics company Statista, surveyed 1,013 consumers ages 19 to 49.
The public’s lack of virtual reality headset awareness suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement—and according to Statista, the market could experience a lift in 2016. So as we near the next calendar year, and possibly, a surging virtual reality market, which headset holds the early edge?
According to Statista’s survey, the Oculus Rift has the upper hand. Built by Oculus VR, a company that Facebook acquired in 2014, the Oculus Rift is able to incorporate real-life head and eye movement into the consumer’s use of the product.
The advantage Oculus Rift holds over the second most well-known headset, the Samsung Gear VR is slight—35 percent of respondents in the survey were aware of the Rift, compared to the 32 percent who knew of the Samsung Gear VR. To use the recently released Gear VR, a consumer needs a Samsung smartphone.
At 29 percent consumer awareness, the Sony Project Morpheus or PlayStation VR placed in third, followed by the Google Cardboard. Rounding out the list was the HTC Vive, 16 percent; Zeiss VR One, 9 percent; and Glyph, 8 percent. Another one percent of the survey participants said that they had heard of another form of virtual reality headset.