Korea Leading Metaverse Patent Applications with the U.S. and China

The Korean Intellectual Property Office announced on Feb. 2 that a total of 31,567 patent applications related to immersive content were made from 2000 to 2020 in the United States, South Korea, Japan, Europe and China and the average annual increase in the number of such patent applications has been 19 percent since 2010.

The applicants, mostly enterprises, are divided into 13,786 American, 6,215 Chinese, 4,620 South Korean, 2,697 European and 2,647 Japanese. In South Korea, individuals and research institutes account for 13.9 percent and 8.4 percent of the applicants, respectively.

The 31,567 applications include those related to providing content (38 percent), interfaces (30 percent), rendering (19 percent) and real-time tracking of biometric user data (13 percent). The United States’ ratio is highest in every technical field, and South Korea’s ratio is 20 percent in tracking and 18 percent in providing content.

According to market research firm Strategy Analytics, the global VR and AR market as the biggest part of the immersive content market is expected to grow six-fold from 2020 to 2025 to reach US$270 billion at the end of the latter.