FBR's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Preview (FB) (MSFT) (AAPL) (FIT) (GPRO)

It's time again for CES predictions and FBR Analyst, Dan Ives highlights Virtual Reality, Wearables and Consumer Drones as the key tech to watch.

After years of development, the tech world will be getting its first glimpse of the highly anticipated virtual reality systems set to hit the consumer market in 1H2016 with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all prepping to release their VR systems that could potentially change the VR landscape for years to come depending on initial consumer adoption. There are a host of private VR focused vendors going after this land grab opportunity but GoPro, Google (Cardboard), and Apple (e.g. Faceshift) could also be major players. The biggest wild card in this market is Microsoft, with Nadella & Co. establishing Redmond as a clear leader on augmented/mixed reality as Hololens (developer kits-1H2016 release) has enormous growth potential.

Apple’s Watch has had choppy success out of the gates but it spearheaded a major paradigm shift in acceptance/adoption of wearables with Samsung, Microsoft, Fitbit, Jawbone, etc. Third-party applications will represent a key driver of use cases for wearables (e.g. health, fashion) which will be a focal point next week at CES, with companies racing to establish themselves as the de facto platform/standard for certain wearables categories.

Consumer drones will also be a highlight of CES, as this technology makes the transition to consumer use with a number of innovative private technology players as well as GoPro (e.g. Karma) focused on this multi-billion opportunity.

Related stocks:

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)
Facebook (NASDAQ: FB)
Fitbit (NYSE: FIT)
GoPro (NASDAQ: GPRO)
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)

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