Taking customer experience to the next level with immersive technology

Humans are social creatures. We suffer from being lonely. We love to share our ideas, feelings and emotions with others. Over the centuries we have developed new ways of connecting to one another - from conversation to images, writing, photography and sound and motion pictures as forms of expression. Technology advancements in the last centuries have enabled humans to create experiences for others to plunge into, making it easier to step beyond the dialogue, and into broadcasting as well as multi-party real-time conversation.

Now we witness the new medium of immersive experience on the rise. As with most visionary innovations the journey for Extended Reality enabling these immersive experiences is longer than most realise as the early explorations date back to 1950s. It’s been hyped in recent years, and 2014 is considered the year that gave virtual reality a real boost with Facebook buying Oculus VR. But even today there is a lot of uncertainty about the technology, its use cases, challenges to be solved and even vocabulary to describe the spectrum of immersive computing. Let’s establish the common understanding with these simple definitions:

• Augmented reality (AR) overlays virtual objects on the real-world environment.
• Mixed reality (MR) not just overlays but anchors virtual objects to the real world.
• Virtual reality (VR) immerses users in a fully artificial digital environment.

All together Virtual, Augmented and Mixed reality - and everything in between that is still be be uncovered - is referred to as Extended Reality, or XR for short.. Immersive experiences are build on either one of the above mentioned techniques, or their combination.

But why should we care? In the last few years of running Tieto XR Lab I’ve seen how this previously difficult question has become a very easy question to answer. The change is inevitable and it is coming fast. Major analytics companies including Gartner and Forrester are betting on XR to become the next revolutionary computing platform, impacting everything starting from entertainment to industrial cases and consumer business, with greatest impact predicted in medicine, education and retail. The level of investment in AR/VR reached record high of 3B USD in 2017, with roughly half of the volume hit in the last quarter. This is only the beginning, the estimated value of VR/AR market is expected to reach 108B USD* in revenue in 2021. (* Digi-Capital)

There is a long way to go for mainstream adoption, no doubt in that. Yet that shouldn’t stop us investigating the possibilities on how can XR help to improve business operations and enhance the customer journey. Read the full story at Tieto Perspectives blog to learn what is our approach.