The rapid emergence of Augment Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) as disruptive next-gen technologies holds immense opportunities for innovators and investors. Every single industry that you can name of today, right from education, healthcare, gaming, real estate, e-commerce – is tapping into the potential of AR/VR. As these two weapons for enhancing customer engagement keep evolving, developers can seamlessly create wholesome applications through AR app development services.
Implementing AR/VR in Business Operations for Better Engagement
Implementation of AR and VR will undeniably change the course of operations in businesses. It can be seen through the reports by International Data Corporation, highlighting that the year 2020 will see the revenues touching $162 billion in the AR/VR market. Here’s how businesses can benefit from the best of both worlds:
Prototyping New Products
Industries today are becoming increasingly competitive by developing new innovative products and even improving the current ones. Hence, the stages in product development and prototyping also need to be enhanced for delivering quality products. The integration of AR and VR technologies can boost and simplify these stages by giving a completely digitalized set up. Moreover, in this age of offering web and mobile app development services, embedding a 3D environment can prove to be a lot beneficial.
Mobile apps with scanning abilities can now scan any product or service where people have to hover the camera to scan over a product, and it will pop up a 3D environment. Production-dependent businesses can immensely benefit from AR and VR as they can eliminate the need to build physical prototypes. They can utilize the potential of simulated digital places for testing new features. Such technologies also help architects by enabling them to present their concepts digitally before the development process even starts.
Understanding and Engaging Customers
The experiences derived from AR and VR technologies can help brand marketers in developing long-lasting relationships with customers. The three most successful strategies that can prove to be useful for marketers are multi-sensory engagement, emotional connections, and intellectual engagement. Sensory engagement can push customers to learn about products and services through touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, providing feedback, and getting connected emotionally with it.
AR can help in creating a surrounding across the customers where they feel comfortable before making a purchasing decision. Since it can help customers understand the product and their own needs better, it will only help to increase the companies’ productivity and brand loyalty. Similarly, VR can help a business involve and immerse their customers in a complete virtual experience of their working environment. Whether it’s a hospital or a restaurant, VR can help customers understand how employees work behind the scenes.
Training the Employees
Training employees in AR and VR technologies have given opportunities to reset the things back if something goes awry. The health industry is already trying out such solutions when they are performing complicated operations on children. Surgeons scan and create 3D environments of the real nursing trainees to make children feel safe when they see familiar faces in the room. Other industries are trying out new tools and equipment manufacturing procedures by monitoring a simulated environment.
Cost-efficient and portable VR solutions for pilots are creating a surrounding where they can fly in a simulated flying sky environment and test the wings before going in the field. Plus, teachers can now train in a virtual environment that gives them an opportunity how well they can teach in front of the kids. It also imitates the real surrounding of a class, where students are disturbing the class and using mobiles.
Conducting Interviews and Conferences
AR and VR are excellent tools to reduce the communication gap between employees and managers and the time taken for business commuting from different locations. The inefficiency of having scattered business teams traveling to meet each other frequently can now be solved by conducting meetings and conferences. Gathering people across the globe is far more affordable, which earlier used to create misunderstandings.
But AR and VR conferences can make the session interactive by conducting seminars, recorded training sessions, recruiting new employees through interviews. Plus, employees can also take a look around the workstation through virtual tours to get a better understanding and idea about their new workplace. Human resources can find it much easier to assess the interviewee’s body language, responses, and behavior through virtual conferences.
Advertising and Marketing
Marketing campaigns are already making disruptive progress through AR and VR in many terms. These two technologies are helping marketers in researching and identifying consumer behaviors, emotional quotient, cultural, social, and demographic trends for forecasting brand growth. They help the brands understand their customer base better. Plus, the hardware is cheaper than software today, and customers are making enough efforts to participate in AR and VR gear experiences.
A mobile app that has AR and VR integrated with it can be a great addition to market a product or service. Products like Google Cardboard can create 360-degree music videos by connecting the headset through the smartphone. Similarly, newspaper publications can also market their online and digital editions by integrating VR technology. It can help customers transport into the story itself and travel through the surroundings virtually to help them form more empathetic and stronger opinions.
Final Words
The expansion of AR/VR into the business markets is becoming a sensational medium to transform tangible products and services into immersive experiences. The convenience of pointing a mobile device on a product or service and instantly getting surrounded by the underlying brand story with AR is taking the market by storm. Similarly, VR is giving consumers a taste of a fictional and digital world by immersing them into such experiences.
Even though the technologies are in the nascent stages, the need to stay competitive is compelling businesses to incorporate them into their daily activities. 9series is one such leading web and app development company that develops excellent apps by integrating AR and VR, to help a business gain maximum ROI.
