Samsung Gear VR has sold 5m units

Samsung revealed yesterday it has shipped five million units of its Gear VR headset since launch.

The announcement was made during Samsung’s press conference at CES 2017, by Samsung Electronics America’s president Tim Baxter. He also said that users have watched over 10m hours of video on Gear VR.

The smartphone-based VR headset launched in the UK in December 2015, being developed in collaboration with Oculus, which then launched its own Rift headset in March 2016.

Samsung’s Gear VR hit the 1m users milestone back in May 2016 and now has more competitors, since Google launched its own smartphone-based VR headset at the end of last year, Daydream.

Talking to MCV last December, GfK director Paul Simpsonbroke down the latest data for virtual reality hardware.