Accelerated Impacts of Immersive Technologies in Modern Businesses

Meta, formerly Facebook, has erased $230 billion in value last week after their earnings fell short of Street expectations. Time will tell IF this is a mess because Meta is sacrificing its core business model for its fascination with the metaverse OR is a bold move by Mark Zuckerberg to win in the future of “real-time-3D-internet”. ?However, the fact of the matter is that the adoption of augmented reality is increasingly impacting businesses.

Augmented Reality (AR) is an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved using digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology. AR keeps you in the physical world, whereas Virtual Reality (VR) places you in a completely simulated, computer-generated environment, where you can view and manipulate virtual objects. Mixed Reality (MR) is a melding of AR with VR. The “Metaverse” is adopting the concept of mixed reality to provide the digital experiences on the internet to play, work, socialize, connect, shop, etc.

Today’s remote-culture has proven that the immersive environment can be an opportunity for all consumer-facing organizations. Meta is an extreme example, but other large giants such as Microsoft (positioning its cloud services to be the digital fabric of metaverse ), Amazon (introducing AR Shopping tool, Room decorator, Amazon Salon, etc .), Apple (nurturing tools for AR development community ) and Google (for building an Augmented Reality OS for the AR/VR devices ) have already thrown their hats in.

Entertainment and gaming companies are already shaping this landscape. We were at the cusp of mobile to immersive computing just about five years back. Lower barriers to entry and the fertile gaming/entertainment industry seeded many innovations in this field. ?The mixed reality market was at $10B in 2017 , grown to be at $57B this year. The slow growth is particularly attributed to negative perceptions about privacy and wellbeing, and talent availability.

Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), providing users with sovereignty of personal data, and increased business use-cases have now accelerated the adoption of immersive technologies and the AR/VR/MR market is now expected to be at $297B by 2024 , according to Boston Consulting Group.

One of the main reasons for this projected hypergrowth is COVID-19. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of immersive technologies as businesses have turned to remote work. You will be impressed with the stock of AR/VR use-cases in Retail, Education, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Defense, etc.

Like in any technological evolution, AR/VR has the challenges such as lack of design standards and examples , potential security vulnerabilities , ?poor integration with the corporate ecosystem , inability to establish upward compatibility as new devices and applications emerge in the market place, greater skills and resource gaps, unknowns in AR/VR testing of non-functional aspects of the applications, uncertainties of impacts of other evolving technologies such as 5G, Edge computing etc. on AR/VR , and more. Like any other technological evolution, all of these challenges will be addressed as the adoption accelerates and the technology matures.

Meta losing market value, is not the indication of the future of immersive technologies. Metaverse may not be the future but the technologies it is championing could be. ?As AR/VR progresses towards the peak of its high expectations , it fuels the business transformations and feeds newer technological evolution, producing more promises and greater possibilities.

Microsoft 's CEO Satya Nadella commented in their last earnings call that they are working to build an "enterprise metaverse" as the digital and physical worlds converge in their offerings; every CEO should be thinking of the same.?