If you’ve dabbled with extended reality (XR) in the past, you may be feeling a little gun-shy. You expected to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report, waving your hands about like a futuristic conductor. Instead, you got to be Tom Cruise in…well, Jerry Maguire — frustrated, stressed out, and worried you made a huge mistake.
The good news is that XR technology, which includes virtual, mixed, and augmented reality (as shown in the clip from our webinar below), has radically improved of late. These days, it’s less of a fun but expensive gimmick, and more a practical business tool.
XR gives buyers a 360-degree view of what they’re buying before they buy. Buyers can actively experience the product, rather than having to add their imagination to the static photos on your webpage.
And it’s not just sales. Extended reality technologies open up a whole new future for product development, employee training, and remote work. Here, we’ll look at some of the practical use cases and key benefits that XR can offer your business.
Your business is changing. Here’s how XR fits in.
How we connect, interact, train, shop, sell, and manage is becoming increasingly digital. Companies are catering to ever-wider, more dispersed customer bases globally. In 2023, almost 20% of global sales were conducted online, with new markets for e-commerce booming in Latin America and Asia.
That poses as many challenges as opportunities. For one, how do you, as a retailer, really showcase your products to your online clients? How can you ensure all your buyers can get a hands-on perspective of your products, whether they visit your showrooms or not?
Buyers want more than static product descriptions and photos. They want to get the look and feel of the products they buy. They want clarity on how those products work, and if they will effectively meet their needs.
On the other side of the counter, sales teams have to familiarize themselves with the products before they can convincingly present them to end users.
This experience is what businesses need to deliver to both their virtual buyers and their sales staff. And they need to do it affordably and digitally.
This is where Extended Reality (XR) comes in.
XR is a whole spectrum of technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), that blend the digital elements with the real world, with various levels of immersion:
- Augmented reality (AR) integrates the real and the virtual, superimposing digital elements onto the real environment using mobile devices — for example, letting customers use their mobile devices to see what a product would look like in their home or workspace.
- Hybrid or mixed reality (MR) merges the real and virtual worlds, bringing digital objects right into physical space, using holograms or projections — for example, so potential buyers can customize a car’s interior with virtual overlays of different upholstery options.
- Virtual reality (VR) is the most immersive element of XR, creating a wholly virtual simulation — for example, immersive virtual store tours or product demonstrations that let customers explore your products and learn more about them in a fully interactive environment.
4 areas where extended reality can benefit businesses
Here are three areas where we’ve seen organizations using XR to significantly improve essential business processes:
1. Better employee training
When it comes to preparing for a physical task, it’s more effective to practice actually doing it than just reading or hearing about how to do it.
Learning by doing can increase knowledge retention and skills acquisition, with one study showing a 72% improvement in learning effectiveness over traditional training methodologies. It builds muscle memory as well as mental memory, so we can understand the processes in a more embodied way.
But what if you don’t have the space or the equipment available to get that hands-on experience? Immersive XR technology can support that learning by doing, letting users engage a range of senses and take part in realistic scenarios, even without the physical tools and resources.
And it works. Studies show that VR learners are 4 times faster and more focused than e-learners and can recall 90% of their XR training — 3 times more than listening.
Here’s an example of what XR for training looks like:
It also makes learning safer. With healthcare and manufacturing the far-and-away leaders for industrial injuries, XR can make it easier to offer training that reduces the potential for accidents.
Let’s say you’re training machine operators to use a hi-tech, hazardous, and expensive piece of equipment. With XR, the workers can try, fail, and perfect their abilities without any risk to the equipment, themselves, or those whose safety depends on their expertise.
Trainee surgeons, likewise, can run through delicate procedures before they ever get to the theatre. So that when it comes to the real thing, they are primed to do it right, and feel almost as though they’ve already done it multiple times.
In fact, a recent study by Nokia and EY found that companies currently using XR for hands-on training have seen a 59% improvement in safety.
Plus, XR-driven learning ends up being better for the bottom line. While initial 3D modeling costs may add upfront expense, XR removes the need to travel to on-site training courses and cuts the cost of hiring space and trainers, transporting equipment, and so on. In fact, this can translate to savings of between 30 and 70% for companies, while still delivering that high-quality, practical training.
Not only that, but XR training keeps your training program consistent across the workforce and lets you scale up as needed.
2. Easier remote collaboration
Dispersed markets mean dispersed teams, with colleagues working, often asynchronously, across the globe. This calls for new ways of collaborating. Platforms like Zoom and Teams have helped to keep teams working together — but XR makes it even easier.
To take just one example: With Bigtincan’s AR technology, your learners can use a QR code to bring a realistic virtual 3D object into their physical space via a mobile device. Teams can experiment, move, resize, place, and modify objects, and learn how they would fit into and interact with the space — no matter where they’re working from.
Or another approach — with virtual rooms, you can give remote teams a shared space that “feels” like the real deal. Imagine a digital space that lets you walk your distributed sales team through each product they’ll be showing to customers, pointing out exactly where they should focus their attention and how each product works — all without any of you needing to travel.
3. More compelling content
Whether you’re designing sales collateral or learning content, XR tech makes it more interactive and so by definition more engaging.
For instance, let’s say you create a 3D model (like in the clip below) of one of your products and upload it to your website. You can add “hotspots” that bring up different information when clicked. You’ve essentially created a self-service product demo that steers customers towards your product’s killer features, while also making a more fun buyer experience in the process.
4. Greater personalization
Today’s buyers expect personalization, and get grumpy when they don’t get it. So how about putting them in a room with your very own customized avatar, who can show them around and give that personal touch? If you’re using Bigtincan, your avatars can even talk the buyer through the experience. With XR tools, they get the showroom experience without ever having to visit the showroom. Like in this Virtual Showroom example:
Go beyond reality with XR
With less overhead, less risk, and wider reach, extended reality is becoming a must-have for doing business online. XR is bridging that space between the virtual and the physical, the local and the global, bringing those physical consumer behaviors into digital spaces.
At Bigtincan, we’re at the coalface of making this a reality. Our Head of Augmented & Virtual Reality, Philippe Jeanrenaud, hosted an on-demand webinar called Beyond Reality: How XR is Shaping Our Future. In it, he walks through the relevance of XR for business today, looking at specific use cases for a range of industries, and exploring interactive examples. Check it out and see how our AR and VR tools can help move your business forward.
