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The Oculus Rift shipped its first unit last week, and Facebook hopes that was the first of many.

The social media giant expects to ship 600,000 units of the virtual reality headset by the end of this year, according to Cantor Fitzgerald. That number is expected to more than triple to approximately 2 million devices, which would generate more than $1.6 billion in revenue for Facebook.

This is a huge deal for Facebook, which currently generates nearly all of its revenue from ad sales across its various platforms.

Facebook purchased Oculus VR, responsible for the technology behind the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, in July 2014 for approximately $2 billion. Since that time, the social media giant has thrown its considerable weight behind VR.

This strategy would keep Facebook at the center of what analysts expect to be a $30 billion industry within five years. If Facebook's plan pays off, then revenue from sales and royalties of all Oculus Rift products (hardware, games, software, etc.) would make up 10% of the company's total revenue by 2020.

Given the expectations for the virtual reality market in the next few years, it's unsurprising that Facebook would make such a push into this field. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on virtual reality hardware that provides proprietary forecasts for VR headset shipments and revenue and estimates average selling price over the next five years. The report also takes a look at the different types of VR headset technology now on the market, discusses which categories will win out, and looks at several use cases for VR headsets, including gaming and other.

Here are some key points from the report:

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets are debuting on the consumer market and set to launch an advanced and immersive content platform. We estimate shipments of VR headsets will grow at a swift 99% compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2020.

VR shipments will create a $2.8 billion hardware market by 2020, up from an estimated $37 million market this year.

VR headsets are a fairly low-cost consumer electronics category, and this will help drive adoption. The devices will be priced similarly to smartwatches and also need to pair with another standalone computing device.

Demand for VR headsets will be fueled by gaming on both mobile and console devices. There are 1.2 billion gamers worldwide, including nearly 1 billion mobile gamers alone. This creates a direct, addressable market for VR headsets.

Beyond gaming, VR will be an important platform for streaming content and even shopping. Oculus has already experimented with Story Studio, a platform for VR movie creation. In addition, many consumers claim the VR experience will drive them to shop more online rather than in stores.

In full, the report:

Forecasts annual shipments of VR headsets between 2015 and 2020.

Sizes the market for VR headset shipments by revenue and anticipates how the VR headset average selling price will trend.

Breaks down VR headset shipments by category, including traditional VR headsets, smartphone-mounted VR headsets, and gaming-console headsets.

Pinpoints the gaming console market as a key driver of demand for VR headsets.

Discusses the opportunity for VR content creation in gaming, streaming video, and shopping.

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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the emerging world of virtual reality hardware.