From ghostbusting experiences at The Beach in Dubai to a “100mph” slide down The Shard in London, we have seen some exhilarating and truly immersive applications of virtual reality (VR) in 2017, proving that the technology has come a very long way from the nausea-inducing experiences of its early days.
We’ve waited a long time for this breakthrough to arrive, and now the industry is powering ahead at breakneck speed. From clunky PCs to the wonders of the touchscreen, the ability to view and manipulate digital information through a variety of different interfaces has become ingrained in us all over the years.
There have been numerous wrong turns along the way, but VR undoubtedly represents the next step in this progression, enabling us to replace our existing reality with an entirely new, digital view of our surroundings.
While VR has been around for many years, the technology has been propelled into the greater public consciousness over the last 12-18 months by the introduction of interactive experiences around the world and the launch of high-profile consumer VR products by the likes of Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung.
Virtual reality necessarily obscures the user’s vision of his/her actual surroundings, so the technology isn’t ideal for on-the-go use. But as the concept continues to gain traction in the consumer space, more commercial opportunities will appear over time.
These commercial opportunities will no doubt be multiplied by the emergence of augmented reality (AR), a technology that takes VR a step further by blending our physical and digital realities together, supplementing our actual surroundings with digital information or objects.
AR requires the use of see-through displays or cameras so that the wearer can see his/her current surroundings, which makes the technology more expensive and harder to create. Consequently, AR will take longer to ramp up than VR, but the use cases for AR are potentially limitless.
It is for this reason that AR will gain strong acceptance within the commercial segment. Indeed, the ability to combine real-world movement with various types of data overlays has a number of business advantages that organisations are only now beginning to explore.
Exploiting these advantages through the innovative application of AR in the business setting is likely to drive dramatic changes in the way work is done. And all this means that while VR will certainly start the faster of the two, the AR market has the potential to grow much bigger in the longer term.
In terms of hardware, AR/VR technology takes three forms: The first is screenless viewers that strap a smartphone screen to the user’s face; the second is tethered head-mounted displays (HMDs) that connect to general-purpose compute device such as a smartphone, PC, or console; and the third is stand-alone HMDs that have the necessary compute power integrated into the display or attached to it.
Global revenues for the AR/VR market are forecast to increase by 100 per cent or more over each of the next four years. Total spending on AR/VR products and services is expected to soar from $11.4 billion in 2017 to nearly $215 billion 2021, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 113.2 per cent along the way.
Aside from the consumer segment, the early pioneers of AR/VR adoption will be the retail and manufacturing industries, with others like government, transportation, and education also leveraging the transformative capabilities of these technologies.
The most popular use cases will evolve over the course of the next five years. Retail showcasing will remain a prominent area of investment throughout, with on-site assembly/safety and process manufacturing also leading the way in 2017.
By 2021, these will have given way to use cases for industrial maintenance and public infrastructure maintenance, the latter of which will also be one of the fastest growing uses cases over this period, alongside lab and field work and therapy and physical rehabilitation.
With use cases that span both the AR and VR environments, significant opportunities will arise for businesses to re-imagine not just the way their employees perform everyday tasks, but also the way in which they interact with their customers.
And as more streamlined, next-generation hardware begins to appear, businesses right across the vertical spectrum will be lining up to be the first to embrace it, leveraging cutting-edge software and services to achieve everything from increasing worker productivity and safety to enticing customers with perfectly tailored personal experiences.
It’s going to be an interesting 5-10 years ahead!
The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.
