EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, played down the growing hype for Virtual Reality (VR), as he predicted the platform needs time to become more affordable in the future.

VR proved a big theme at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) with Samsung making a splash through the launch of a new VR compatible camera, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the technology could one day become the world’s most social platform.

Segars, whose company provides chipsets and computing processors for many of the mobile devices available today, agreed that VR will “prove to be a popular class of technology”, but perhaps not quite as big as the industry is predicting.

“I don’t think it will be as popular as the mobile phone,” he told Mobile World Live. “It’s hard to imagine one [VR headset] for every person on the planet but it will definitely be a big market.”

Segars does however believe the platform will evolve rapidly over the next two years to provide a more immersive experience, and this will come hand in hand with a drop in price points.

“To do real high end VR, you need a lot of compute power and graphics performance, which is naturally very expensive right now,” he said. “But as we’ve seen with smartphones, digital cameras and TVs, these are the types of products that get inexpensive very quickly, and technology does ripple down from the top in a very rapid way.”

In the interview, Segars also addressed the future of the autonomous car, and his thoughts on how 5G could fuel the Internet of Things. Click here to watch.