By Chandra Surbhat, Vice President & Practice Head, Digital Experience, Wipro Limited
Immersive technologies are set to have a transformative impact on business. It has already initiated a paradigm shift in the way organizations interact with their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. Immersive technologies blur the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. The benefits leveraging virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) to drive an experience-led company cannot be overstated. It will create new ways of engaging with customers, simplifying processes, decreasing costs, and increasing revenues.
First and foremost, immersive technology enhances customer engagement by creating interactive and personalized experiences, enabling customers to interact with a brand in the medium of their choice. It also provides the business an opportunity to respond to them contextually leading to increased customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, improved business outcomes.
There are also tremendous benefits for a companies’ internal customers – the employees. They can interact with virtual environments and objects, regardless of their physical location, which means teams can collaborate more effectively. Integrating immersive experiences to training provides a near physical experience for employees to acquire new skills, practice complex procedures, and gain hands-on experience without any physical location limitations.
Immersive tech allows for real-time visualization, simulation, and manipulation of complex data, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving. It can also enhance efficiency in business processes, streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce human errors.
There are challenges to implementing enterprise-wide immersive technology, like costs associated with hardware and software procurement, development, and maintenance. It is also crucial for companies to implement robust security measures to address data security and privacy concerns.
However, with advancements in hardware and software, costs are decreasing, making immersive tech more accessible to enterprises. Additionally, innovations in cloud computing and edge computing enable more efficient and scalable deployment of immersive experiences.
Moreover, emerging technologies like blockchain can enhance data security and privacy in immersive applications. By leveraging blockchain’s decentralized and immutable nature, companies can ensure the integrity and confidentiality of user data, building trust and compliance.
The early adopters will clearly stand to gain from brand visibility, the ability to iterate and fine-tune models, and have the opportunity to be leaders.
To successfully implement immersive technology, companies should follow a structured adoption model.
1. Market Maturity driven Immersive Technology Adoption
While the above said benefits can be realized across markets, gestation time for realizing the benefits vary from country to country driven by digitalization maturity, infrastructure readiness (Connectivity Infra such as 5G), User segment (percentage of GenX/Gen Y), culture, affordability, government regulations & compliances, security infrastructure, startup ecosystem.
The above factors will enable companies to arrive at possible time frame of immersive technology adotion from the foundation level capability – > enterprise level capability – > mainstream adoption.
India is making non-linear changes through Digital Public infrastructure creating impact across the entire society. Digital public infrastructure is built on layers of Data, payments and identity. Smart phone penetration has touched 66%, 10MB data costs only a dollar, has recorded world’s highest digital payments.
Over $1.2B people carry digital identity, transact digitally, control data sharing driving more trust and privacy. Digital public infrastructure will add credit, eCommerce and logistics layers going forward.
With a robust start up economy and 50%+ population under 25, India offers a great opportunity to take advantage of the immersive technologies.
2. Industry and business-first adoption
Industry context is key to understand specific problem or scenario which makes the most impact. Banking industry is experimenting with Metaverse branch, gaming industry has an opportunity to drive greater engagement, shopping can be much more compelling while driving increased sales.
Rapid prototyping, fail fast model, an approach to drive enterprise horizontal use cases like onboarding, trainings will help organisations and employees to experience the technology and come with creative ideas for customers. This will boost productivity and retention. Field service is another area which will benefit significantly from immersive technologies.
3. Usecase driven adoption – Design-led thinking with a human-centric approach.
Human centric approach to experience will enable identification of gaps which can be bridged or areas of delight which will enhance the overall experience. Convergence of business / industry and human centered will be very impactful to drive adoption and return on investment.
4. Next Generation Talent Development – Developer Community of Practice
Metaverse talent building needs a holistic approach of various technologies, partnerships coupled with human centered design thinking. Organisations can think of setting up Metaverse POD to bring together various technologies such as spatial technologies (XR/MR/VR/AR/BCI), immersive technology platforms (such as Unity/Unreal/Spatial), connectivity technology (5G/Edge), Device Engineering Hardware(GPU based) & 3D Modelling Tools, content authoring & rendering tools.
Technology specialists operating within a POD will enable accelerated use case identification to delivery and scaling up competencies. Participation in metaverse industry forums and contributing to research, standards definition will enable visibility into future / upcoming trends. Building solutions / accelerators will be next natural step to bring down cost and time for new implementations.
We are already seeing clients experiment with proof of concepts that help foster employee collaboration, training, services and product innovation as well as customer engagement in the immersive world. The POD approach will help accelerate the development of these solutions, driving rapid deployment to a broad range of use cases internally and to clients.