As a technical professional, helping customers is my main goal. It is not just for providing a solution to their problems, but helping them transform, innovate and enhance their business. Using extended reality can keep you and your company on the cutting edge, setting you apart from your competition who may be slow to adopt it. It also can help you equips your customers and your team with new opportunities. In order to help you, understand the benefits of investing in XR, let me introduce some ideas.
Extended reality (XR): “the scenarios”
XR is short for extended reality. It’s a convergence of the real, physical world around us and a digital world or space. The latest researches show that people expect XR to become mainstream in the next five years. We are talking about a technology that will affect shopping preferences, how companies interact with customers, and how companies think about their brands. This technology will shape a world very differently from today’s current commerce experience. The main reason for this change is a device most of us carry in our pockets: our smartphones.
XR technologies directly affect the very core of an organization’s digital reinvention strategy. But If you don’t understand how can you apply this to your business, then let me give you a couple of ideas.
Immersive training
When you think about developing an application for training you need to think on:
- Remote experts: If you have customers in which essential workers depend on experts of your company, this technology can help you reach more customers with remote experts that allow them to provide operational continuity on mission-critical projects. XR allows the remote expert to superimpose markings, messages, and diagrams directly onto the customer’s engineer field of view, and the use of smart glasses keeps the engineer’s hands-free to simultaneously perform fixes.
- The new normal and return to work: XR can help your company to maintain a safe and productive environment by allowing your workers to work in the same environment interacting with holograms with distance. By leveraging XR technology, you can create a digital twin of your physical office space to give your workers and customers an involving experience proven to quickly increase knowledge retention and decrease safety incidents.
More engaging shopping and merchandising experience
XR can provide more immersive experiences. In addition to bringing a certain layer of fun to your brand, XR can be used for:
- Virtual Tours: A virtual tour can allow prospective homebuyers to view a property using their smartphone or computer before visiting the house in person. Extended reality can also help users determine how items will fit inside their homes. Any smartphone or tablet can be an AR platform to create a shopping environment for customers.
- Difficult customer situations: Train your staff to prepare for difficult or tricky customer service situations.
- Connect with customers: Help your sales team to connect customers with the best options. And give them digital information anywhere.
- Product Preview: Let customers “try out” a product. From in-app devices to headset-enabled simulators, you can “be there” without being there and trying it, even before it exists.
- Design: Create new designs or let your customer create their own products in a digital world.
Repair and maintenance
XR can help you display digital information.
- Digital Manuals: Using XR, you can provide your consumers or workers with manuals with how-to information for repairs, maintenance and product features. You can display videos, 3D overlay images that appear when users scan various areas or products and dozens of informational guides.
- Problem identification with AI: XR makes it possible for inexperienced users to identify problems and perform repairs by following step-by-step instructions using digital overlays, improving customer satisfaction by reducing downtime and the associated costs.
- Improve safety: The use of XR in the field can improve safety, reduce confusion, and take the pressure off engineers who can’t possibly be experts in all technologies and infrastructures. XR can empower a mobile workforce, linking workers to experts around the globe.
What are the challenges behind XR?
XR technologies collect and process a huge amount of information such as what a user sees, how they interact with virtual objects, and even how they feel.
To get the full XR experience, certain hardware may be required, depending on the scenario you would like to apply. Again, think about enhancing the physical with the digital. You may need tools to provide that combined experience. Typical hardware may include a tablet, such as an iPad, a smartphone, a headset, earphones, or other body wear, including gloves, etc. And the only challenge you might face is choosing the correct device for the scenario you would like to develop.
How much does XR Development cost?
XR application development cost comes down to the kind of content you are looking to create. Sometimes you will need a Mixed Reality application, other times you might be looking for a Virtual Reality, or an Augmented reality application. Some applications can be built with simple 360 videos, while others will be built in full CG-based environments. The scale and complexity of each obviously will add or subtract to the total cost of development.
The development of your application might also need cloud services (Azure, AWS, Google), or you might include artificial intelligence in it.
Succeeding with XR development and cost will rely on an organization’s infrastructure, data, and cloud capabilities, as well as a clear vision for the design of improved customer and employee experiences.
The key is to contact a company that can companion your business that is an end-to-end solution provider and that delivers industry-specific HR strategy, delivery, and managed services.
Conclusion – Towards the future
As technology is catching up with our imaginations, XR is ripe with big, beautiful opportunities to satisfy our expectations and accelerate our very human reality. The mix of technology and human ingenuity offered by XR has tremendous power to help us all navigate this “very human reality” and pivot the story of COVID-19 from one of challenge and isolation to one of growth and reinvention.
XR solutions can reduce costs, increase revenue and productivity, and improve customer experience, which makes this technology an interesting investment, don’t you think?
