Raniere VR Glasses Enter China, Is the Winter of Domestic VR Products Coming?

2016 marked the first year of VR, with all kinds of VR products emerging one after another. The products are mainly divided into three categories by price and performance: VR head-mounted displays, VR all-in-one machines, and VR phone headsets. Only three brands, Sony, Oculus, and HTC, dominate the high-end VR market. There is no doubt that VR head-mounted displays offer the best experience in terms of scene atmosphere creation, user immersion, and image clarity. On the other hand, its excessively high cost and market pricing have become limitations for market expansion. For example, a high-end VR head-mounted display needs to be used together with a high-configuration PC host, which greatly increases the experience cost of VR head-mounted displays. According to industry analysts, only 1.7 million units of the three major high-end VR products were sold in 2016.

A VR all-in-one machine, as the name suggests, has a built-in independent display screen and processor. Independent computing and independent input and output are the selling points of VR all-in-one machines, which deliver a freer using experience. Domestic brands such as Deepoon, Antvr, and Inphic have made bold attempts in VR all-in-one machines. However, the market response has been mediocre since the launch of VR all-in-one machines, and users have reported poor experience. In my opinion, on the one hand, when VR technology is still immature, excessively pursuing the innovation of all-in-one machines is somewhat putting the cart before the horse. On the other hand, there is no high-quality innovative content (games, applications, etc.) to match it. Therefore, when the pricing is ten times higher than that of VR phone headsets, while the user experience is no different from that of VR phone headsets, it is inevitable that VR all-in-one machines will receive a poor market response.

A mobile VR phone headset has no built-in display and needs to be used with a mobile phone. Nowadays, whether in e-commerce platforms or offline physical stores, VR phone headsets occupy the vast majority of the market. Since the beginning of 2016, the domestic VR glasses, Ghost VR headset, was launched, and similar products have emerged one after another. The people-friendly price has met users' experience needs to a certain extent. At the same time, problems such as motion sickness, technical bottlenecks in multi-scenario and multi-industry integration, and poor experience brought by shoddy counterfeit products flooding the market have greatly reduced users' favorability towards the VR industry.

Lanier VR glasses enters China Is a cold winter coming for domestic VR products?

Lanier VR glasses is a VR product developed and researched by American Lanier Technology Co., Ltd., named after Jaron Lanier, who is globally recognized as the father of virtual reality. In the United States, in the field of VR intelligent hardware, the Lanier brand can hold its own against Google VR. Lanier VR focuses on artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and has full advantages in R&D technology, efficiency and cost.

Against the background of the rapid development and chaotic market of the domestic VR industry, Lanier VR glasses, which has long occupied the European and American markets, entering China is undoubtedly a huge impact on the domestic market structure, and also an opportunity and challenge for Lanier itself. Objectively speaking, LANIER VR has more mature international technology, clearer images, and solves some technical problems such as motion sickness. Its long-term occupation of the European and American markets has enabled it to establish more mature industry standards. However, in the domestic market, mobile VR headset brands such as Ghost VR, Baofeng Mojing, VR BOX, MOKE, Antvr, and Deepoon enjoy high popularity and sales, and their prices are people-friendly, which increases the difficulty for Lanier to open up the Chinese market. It is understood that different from the marketing strategy of foreign brands such as Sony, Oculus, and HTC when entering China, which focuses on high-end VR, high experience cost and high pricing, Lanier positions the price of its LANIER Super Image series between 32 and 59 US dollars (198 to 393 RMB). It adopts people-friendly pricing and cost-effective products to open up the Chinese market at a faster speed, so that product pricing and experience cost no longer become limitations for market expansion.

Unlike domestic VR brands that are eager to develop VR all-in-one machines by putting the cart before the horse, Lanier focuses on solving technical problems such as body heating, blurry images, easy falling off and poor fitting of head-mounted equipment, incompatibility with prescription glasses, and motion sickness. It finally improved the LANIER Super Image series into a cost-effective VR glasses with clear images, well-fitted head-mounted equipment, no motion sickness, and rotatable adjustment for myopia and astigmatism. In the domestic market, when users choose VR products, they pay more attention to the experience of VR image perception. Therefore, in my opinion, Lanier's marketing strategy and development direction are undoubtedly more suitable for the current situation of the Chinese market.

Nowadays, the rapid development of the VR industry has led to market chaos. Lanier's entry into China is like a clear stream pouring into the Chinese market, which is both an opportunity and a challenge. The high-end development of mobile VR headsets is just around the corner.