The accelerated pace of today’s digital innovation is reshaping industries and consumer expectations at breakneck speed. Now, thanks to the boost provided by extended reality and generative AI, the pace of this digital evolution has further increased.
In recent times, particularly during the pandemic, businesses across the globe have had to adapt and innovate technologically to meet rising customer expectations. Immersive experiences are at the forefront of this digital revolution, with extended reality (XR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) creating new dimensions for interaction and engagement.
This relentless wave of digital innovation, propelled by investments from big tech companies in AR, VR, XR, and now generative AI, is not just transforming how we experience the digital realm but is setting a new standard for what customers consider the norm.
Today, XR is reshaping industries from healthcare to retail. VR, for instance, transcends gaming realms in areas such as employee training and architectural design. AR is pivotal in enhancing the shopping experience, allowing customers to visualize products in their daily lives before purchase.
The applications of XR can be groundbreaking. For sales, showcasing products in immersive environments can dramatically boost engagement and sales conversion. In manufacturing and design, XR can streamline product development and prototyping processes.
XR technology has emerged as a revolutionary force; businesses are realizing its potential and incorporating it as a core component of their strategic initiatives. Here are three major ways it’s positively impacting how global companies operate:
Some businesses are at the forefront of adopting cutting-edge technologies and making substantial investments in immersive applications. Here’s the evidence:
Businesses are harnessing the power of XR to drive change, solve practical problems, and deliver extraordinary user experiences. Here are some compelling customer stories:
From savings in content production to enhanced customer experiences and operational safety, these examples underscore the versatility and benefits of XR across multiple sectors, demonstrating how businesses are applying the technology to their challenges and ambitions.
When determining how to integrate XR technology into their operations effectively, leaders must make four strategic considerations:
2. Competition and talent acquisition: A significant challenge facing leaders is the fierce competition for talent possessing both technical expertise in XR technologies and industry-specific experience. Businesses need to:
3. Longevity and support: Companies need assurance that their investment won’t become obsolete. To mitigate these concerns:
4. Implementation and scaling: Companies must evaluate the complexity of the technology and the availability of resources, and if both will scale to meet their business needs:
By addressing these considerations with a well-planned approach, technical leaders can make the case for the investment in XR as a concrete step towards sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
To deliver compelling and immersive experiences, there are four steps crucial to harnessing the power of XR technologies:
2. Identify use cases and assess resources
3. Launch pilot and build foundation
4. Build and deploy at scale
XR is no longer confined to the world of gaming and entertainment, though it has learned a lot from them. Today, it’s revolutionizing various industry sectors by offering businesses unprecedented ways to visualize products, simulate training environments, and enhance customer experiences. Let’s discuss some use cases.
1. Immersive training to empower employees
Traditional training methods are often inadequate, leading to low retention and high costs. They fall short of ensuring employees fully grasp complex concepts and procedures. XR technology helps you create immersive training experiences that enhance skills and knowledge retention.
Imagine maintenance staff performing virtual repairs on equipment, learning procedures hands-on without the associated risks or costs of real-world training. Or picture sales teams navigating immersive spaces to better understand the products they sell, making them more effective and confident in their roles.
These are just some examples of how empowering employees with immersive training can translate into a significant return on investment. On the other hand, traditional employee training methods face a myriad of challenges that diminish their effectiveness, including:
Here are the major benefits of immersive training solutions:
With immersive training, costs are significantly reduced, engagement and retention of knowledge are boosted, and the training material can be delivered anywhere across the globe. Studies have shown trainees complete training up to four times faster and feel up to 275% more confident* to act on their learning when trained in virtual reality environments rather than in conventional training.
*The Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Soft Skills Training in the Enterprise, PWC (June 25, 2020)
Customer spotlight | Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has adopted immersive training methods and they’re realizing multiple benefits. For example, their surgeons are enabled to quickly create and utilize 3D models for urgent medical procedures; they have virtual environments allowing patients to engage in their own healthcare; and they can invite surgeons from around the world to collaborate within virtual spaces. All of these allow them to share insights and plan surgeries with a level of interaction that was previously impossible.
2. Immersive 3D collaboration to boost efficiency
Effective collaboration is core to a successful business. XR technology offers a collaboration platform that enables teams to interact dynamically with complex models and prototypes, discuss potential changes, and test outcomes in a virtual space accessible from anywhere in the world. This level of interaction and visualization equips teams to make informed decisions faster and with greater confidence, thus reducing the time and resources spent on product development cycles and operational planning.
While traditional collaboration tools have their place, they often fall short when the task is to share and understand data that’s inherently three-dimensional. Here are some common challenges in the handling of 3D data:
Immersive 3D collaboration solutions unlock data and improve project delivery:
With immersive 3D collaboration solutions, you get more out of the data you already have, with stronger stakeholder collaboration and communication, reduced costs through reduced rework, and experiences that can be deployed anytime, anywhere.
Customer spotlight | Volvo
This carmaker has revolutionized its product lifecycle by implementing immersive 3D collaboration. Now its teams can connect at each stage of the process, from design and R&D to consumer-facing applications, using Unity as a unifying platform. This has accelerated design iteration and reduced costs, with engineers and designers able to work collaboratively in an immersive environment to see the same virtual vehicle. Furthermore, Volvo has significantly cut its reliance on expensive prototypes, only creating physical models at key milestones and using virtual experiences for research, user testing, and iterative design. This efficient process has empowered Volvo to streamline production.
3. Immersive experiences to increase customer engagement
In a digital age where most consumers crave interaction and personalization, XR technology can be leveraged to attract and retain customers. Interactive 3D product demos add to an immersive experience that 2D images and videos cannot match. Customers can explore products at their own pace, customize features in real-time, see them in their environment and make informed purchase decisions, ultimately boosting engagement and loyalty.
Such immersive experiences are not just limited to high-end consumer goods but can be effectively utilized across industries such as real estate, automotive, and manufacturing, offering potential buyers and students a “try before you buy” experience that can influence their decision-making.
Common challenges in traditional marketing:
The benefits of building and scaling immersive customer experiences:
The results speak for themselves: 76% indicate that these experiences increase their purchase confidence. Businesses see increased conversion rates due to enhanced product interactivity and visualization, customers are more satisfied and loyal because of the deeper brand connection, and costs to the business are reduced through streamlining of operations.
Customer spotlight | Bosch
Bosch Rexroth built a virtual showroom that enables the exploration and display of large industrial products without the challenges of conventional real-world demonstrations. Their VR application provides a better sales experience and moves away from 2D sales enablement materials; sales teams can demonstrate the finer details of each product, by employing virtual product teardowns. To reproduce such demonstrations in real life would take hours of disassembly and reassembly. In the virtual showroom, it takes less than 30 seconds. The interactive nature of the experience allows for greater customer involvement compared to more conventional methods such as presentations, ultimately creating deeper engagement with their customers.
4. Embedded systems to enable next-gen experiences
XR technology isn’t just for standalone applications; it can be embedded within systems to create dynamic user interfaces and dashboards that integrate live data. For instance, in automotive applications, dashboard controls and navigation systems can provide an immersive, lifelike representation of driving data and surroundings.
Here are the major challenges of innovation in embedded systems:
The benefit of building and scaling embedded systems with Unity:
Embedded systems come with stringent performance requirements, but with Unity, brands can deliver high-performance human machine interface (HMI) solutions that provide exceptional visual quality, even on standard automotive chipsets. Getting there will be easier, as the platform encourages a functional user experience that allows designers, developers, and other stakeholders to collaborate effectively, from the prototype phase throughout production. They can also deploy the same Unity project across different product lines and customize it based on trim levels, local markets, or other factors.
Customer spotlight | BMW
BMW, the multinational manufacturer of luxury vehicles, is redefining the in-vehicle experience with AR glasses to improve driver safety and navigation. The AR glasses provide graphical distance representations during parking, navigation arrows tfor guidance, and much more. They’re intended to be an extension to a regular head-up system, which would provide important information that is not world-locked, like vehicle speed, current speed limit etc. They cover a good portion of the real world with augmentations, thus extending the traditional head-up. The BMW Group has also been known for pioneering digital innovations in the automotive industry in the past decade, and with the AR glasses, they continue leading the charge in finding ways to bring augmented reality technology to their vehicles.
With the rise of XR, enterprises are no longer shackled by the limitations of traditional 2D displays and videos. Instead, they can harness the power of immersive, lifelike environments to drive sales, training, and customer interactions. As a global leader in 3D content and software creation, Unity offers a comprehensive platform to innovate and deliver such experiences in three main phases:
Implementing Unity as your platform is about more than just staying ahead of the technological curve. It’s about harnessing a platform that has been designed from the ground up with the needs of creators and the realities of deployment in mind. It’s also about investing in a holistic solution and services that are committed to your success at every phase of project development.
