LeTV gears up for the boom of China's VR market

China's VR market has only really taken off, however, since Facebook agreed to buy Oculus for $2 billion in cash and stock in March last year.

"In 1995, Chinese started to pay attention to the VR industry. However, most of the R&D is focusing on B2B sectors, or applies to professional projects within the industrial field," said Weng Dongdong, an associate professor at the Center for Research on Optoelectronics, Information Technology and Color Engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Prior to LeVR, there were already plenty of competitive VR gadgets: Lingvr, 3Glasses, Antvr kit, Baofeng magic mirror and DëePoon.

According to LeTV, the company has already signed deals with Lingvr, Antvr and 3Glasses. Lingvr will exclusively work with LeVR to promote the latter's VR app -- Le Shijie and LeTV's video content will be exclusively provide to Antvr kit.

The new headset is priced at 149 yuan ($23), and is currently only compatible with LeTV's native smartphones.

The company will launch an upgraded generation for the other brand phone users and a premium all-in-one VR device will also be unveiled in the first half of next year.

According to BI Intelligence, a research and information service provider operated by the Business Insider, the compound average growth rate of the VR hardware market is expected to be 99 percent from 2015 to 2020.

It also predicts that the global VR hardware market will hit $2.8 billion by 2020, while its revenue for last year was just $37 million.

There are no obvious technical gaps between western technology multinationals and domestic startups, as three of the key aspects in the VR development process, interior R&D input exterior market investment environment and consumption demands have spaced out the differences.

"From the global perspective of the market, both China and the world are still in the early development stage of the VR industry. A star product that attracts a large number of consumers hasn't appeared in any of the markets," said Wang. "The investment environment is more flexible overseas and more funds have been invested in this area. The $2 billion acquisition by Facebook to purchase Oculus is an example that exactly supports this."

In terms of the buyer behavior, VR product has not been well recognized by Chinese yet. Being as a price-sensitive market, take the video game console as an example, the market penetration rates of game consoles such as the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One are much higher in western countries than they are on the Chinese mainland, and similar to that, consumption demand and consumption power for high technology in high price products in China is lower than in Western countries.

Several key elements will play a vital role on the users' experience, elements such as: content building, the device's weight, display resolution, visual angle, screen refresh rate, interactive mode and spinning sensation. These will finally become the development bottleneck of VR gears.

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