Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is changing our daily lives faster than it could be predicted. According to market intelligence firm IDC, worldwide expenses on AR and VR products and services will be up 69% this year, and the total annual growth over 5 years will increase to 70% from 2017 to 2022. So, what else do the forecasts tell us and why should businesses take a closer look at XR (Extended Reality)?
While consumer spending on XR is and will remain the largest part of the market, it is expected that it will grow at a slower pace than retail, manufacturing, government, and wholesale technology spending. Nevertheless, Virtual and Augmented Reality has the potential to become the next big computing platform, according to Goldman Sachs Research. They predict that the industry can reach a value of $80 billion a year ($35 billion software and $45 billion hardware) by 2025. Despite the fact that forecasts in different sources may vary, they all show the main – a huge increase in the next 10 years, and all studies show a cumulative annual growth rate of 40–80%.
Bigger players – bigger bets
Many innovative projects have shown the world that Extended Reality has a good commercial value and potential for the future. Large enterprises are witnessing the growth of AR/VR and planning to develop their future projects. The list of companies that invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of AR and VR, includes the leading global corporations: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung and others.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has often expressed his interest in Augmented Reality and his belief that the technology would eventually shape our lives. Recently the company applied for a patent on a mixed reality headset that includes a number of sensors to track eyes, gestures, and facial expressions.It’s just one of Apple patents, and like others, it indicates that Apple is broadly examining how AR might translate from phones to glasses. In March, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimated that the company may start to produce its headset by Q4 of this year, and then publicly introduce it in 2020.
Worldwide race
Tim Cook and Western companies are not the only one to see huge potential in Extended Reality. Improvements in technology have significantly affected the development of Augmented Reality and Virtual reality in areas around the world, including in the Asia-Pacific region.
Digi-Capital’s AR/VR Analytics Platform that tracked over $5.4 billion AR and VR investments in the last 12 months to Q2 2019, shows that Chinese companies were raising 2,5 times more dollars (or yuan) from their North American colleagues. Global deal value, or dollars invested, was up in the second quarter of 2019 over the previous one, driven by large late-stage deals on computer vision/AR.
Although the US beat China in VR/AR revenue last year, forecasts indicate China may surpass the States soon. The research mentioned before from Digi-Capital also shows that by 2022, China could take more than $1 of every $5 put toward these technologies. It is worth noting that governmental support is propelling this AR and VR growth in China. Last year the Chinese government has released a document entitled “Guiding Opinions of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Accelerating the Advancement of the Development of the Virtual Reality Industry”. Briefly, it states that the government wants to see growth in all the areas that concern VR. It means that here we are not only talking about manufacturing headsets but also about innovating the technologies for what concerns data processing, 3D modeling, motion capture, localization and so on.
Although China has a leading position in the Asia-Pacific region, other countries (e.g. South Korea or Singapore) are not content with trailing far behind.
Why should brands invest in VR?
There is no doubt that VR and AR will continue to grow, and brands that ignore this fact will be at risk of being left behind pretty soon. Extended Reality provides businesses with a technology that assists with a variety of internal and external tasks: helps them save on an array of business costs, enhances marketing campaigns, and provides new visualization and design opportunities for product development. According to research provided by Accenture, XR is boosting employees’ productivity through human + machine collaboration.
On average, 21% of working time could be augmented by the use of XR.
As you can see below, this share can increase to 30% in healthcare and social services, manufacturing and construction.
Source: Accenture
If you’re doubting how beneficial investment in AR and VR could be to your business, consider the following ways you’ll get a return on those types of investment:
Improve remote collaboration and business meetings. With access to VR technology, employees and business partners no longer have to be connected with geographic boundaries. The technology allows employees who are working remotely to be in the same virtual room, which increases employee engagement, communication and collaboration. It also expands the opportunities available to enterprises and reduces/eliminates the cost of moving.
Strengthen consumer relationships. Virtual reality enables an entirely new interpretation and expression of the brand thanks to building deeper levels of human connection and cultural empathy. Touchstone Research put it in numbers. Brands that invest in VR are more likely to go viral. Brands that invest in VR are more likely to become viral. 81% of consumers using VR tell their friends about it. On YouTube, 360 videos have a browsing speed of 28.81% higher than fixed video. The clickthrough rate for VR reaches 4.51%, compared to 0.56% CTR for fixed video.
Take prototyping to the next level. Consider how much of your budget goes to supplying or replacing expensive hardware for employees. VR can eliminate these expenses by allowing you to create a virtual office with screens, boardrooms, and presentation spaces. Proper software will definitely reduce your operational costs and time. For example, Virtualist app allows creating a shared virtual space just in 3 steps. In architecture and design, where the decision-making process is crucial, virtual models and prototypes bring several advantages. While standard 2D designs may look acceptable on paper, nothing compares to giving clients a virtual tour where they can experience an interactive visual representation of the final product, and see the real scale. By using it at a proposal meeting, a designer or engineer can put the client into VR or AR and walk them through the critical aspects of the design.
As VR and AR both continue to prove their worth at reducing risks and costs, we are going to notice an increasingly rapid pace of investing in other industries involving work with expensive tools or demanding conditions the coming years.
It was a sunny October day when more than 400 guests including top DHL management from the US were invited into a special VR dome constructed to go… on a trip to space and fly with DHL shuttle. Sounds awesome, right? This is just the beginning of the story of how we helped to organise a big corporate event for launching DHL presence using VR technology.
Our 8-minute-long animation was screened in 360° format on 900m2 surface inside the dome. After this event, we’ve received feedback from our friends at DW GROUP saying: “Everyone, from the top managers to the security team, was awed by your production”. Moreover, this experience was repeated to IBM when they were looking for a creative way to present their security cloud benefits. IBM had a 360° movie showcasing their X-Force Command Center which was ideal to present in the Virtual Reality dome.
So, here we are going to prove why VR is the greatest tool for making presentations in comparison with standard 2-D slides.
79% agree that “most presentations are boring.”
Shorter audience attention spans and information fatigue mean that people have less and less time for less-than-engaging presentations. According to Presentation Panda survey, most modern presentations don’t attract viewers’ attention. From poor image choices to lengthy bullet points we can talk about the many ways a presentation can go wrong. As a result, if your storytelling, infographics, or video doesn’t add value for the audience you will fail to effectively communicate information which may pose an organizational, brand or even financial risk.
Understanding your audience means not just understanding their needs but also being empathetic to the way you present. With the advancing technologies in the presentation space, we can tell our stories in interactive, new and engaging ways. Using 360° content (photos, videos, or virtual environments), VR adds a new dimension to standard presentations, whether that’s a conference, meet up, networking event or a pitch in front of investors. Once you put on a VR headset, it looks and feels as if you are actually at the event. The viewer is completely surrounded by your virtual world. Besides concept presentations, it can be used to prepare VR showreel, mood board, or 3-D tours. Now imagine that you can invite even hundreds of users inside the 360° space and they can be inside the dome, watch and interact with the action around them.
Who can use it?
The way we consume and present information and data is changing. Marketers and CEOs can use VR presentations to give a better context as to what their product really looks like and works. Especially, these types of presentations can seriously change design, engineering, and architecture industries. With 360° images and videos of your project, viewers will be able to immerse themselves in virtual reality and feel all the details of your design on the scale in which they are performed. Various consumer goods brands can more accurately display where, when and how their product is best experienced.
Scientific researchers or start-up founders can provide the audience with a more complete perspective and physical view of works or pitch decks they have. VR solutions help to foster stronger feelings of empathy and more importantly help drive change. Imagine how this may impact on business angels or incubators and their decisions to invest in your idea.
Let’s say, you want to convince investors to buy shares of a new shopping center. Ordinarily, you would have to provide 3D renders, architectural drawings or a physical layout of the complex for that meeting, which doesn’t give a clear picture of how it will look like. But if you bring VR glasses and show investors a prepared a 3D tour, for sure you will achieve a completely different effect due to the feeling of immersion and presence.
Dozens of other product or service categories can also leverage this new 3D format to forge stronger bonds with their target audience. Finally, what is perhaps most important is that a user is given control to engage and interact with content like never before. It has the potential to be a key tool that increases audience interest and consequently, revenues and brand loyalty.
What do you need to create a presentation for VR dome?
VR presentation helps to remember more information by using visible three-dimensional forms. They are complemented by visual and sound effects to enhance entertainment. So it’s time to move on to the technical part. Here we would like to give you some tips on prototyping your content using the example of VR Dome experience.
First thing is to download the Fulldome OS Viewer – the prototyping tool that will help you see how your content is going to be viewed inside and how the system works.
When downloaded make sure you’ve unzipped it and open the folder. Then, go to the DomeViewer/binaries/Win64/local/video folder and upload your produced videos inside. Make sure all content is in the mp4 format. To ensure the movie has thumbnail picture in the system you have to upload the .png file with the same name as the .mp4 file to this folder. Then go back to the main folder and run Hyperdome.exe.
You are greeted with the main screen in the fulldome format. In the physical dome, you can control the system with the Xbox gamepad. In the Fulldome Viewer OS however, you can use your PC keyboard with the key mappings.
This functionality allows to prototype your movie and when a unit arrives you can use it with the supplied Fulldome OS software to quickly calibrate the experience.
Would you like to prepare a presentation without a dome? We are ready to create the necessary content for your virtual presentation – your role is only to impress future customers. Just drop us a line to discuss details.
Some words about the price
The cost of organizing VR presentations depends on several factors. To answer this question, we would like to request the following information:
What is your idea and what exactly would you like to present;
Preferable duration of VR presentation;
Date, time and place;
What content you want to show;
The maximum number of viewers who will be invited;
Whether you want to make a presentation with 3D glasses provided for each viewer or not.
If you are inspired by the idea to make a VR presentation and would like to make it real, contact our team.
Today we’re sharing a short and quick study on how to easily upload your own geometry into AR & VR without any specialist knowledge. Since it’s 24th of December we thought the best idea would be to make it with the incredible, scanned Santa 3D model made by the 3D Tree llc and available on Turbosquid.
The import of the 3d geometry and the material set up from imported textures takes less than a minute using the Virtualist app. Upload to the cloud depends on the connection speed of the internet and then there’s mobile AR and desktop VR scenarios that load the file from the cloud. Whole effort took us less than 3 minutes.
