2022 perspective on the major XR platforms and players from the SME perspective
It is 2022 and a new wave of XR technologies is hitting the markets. We are seeing major developments that will affect the dynamics for the years to come. In this article, we’re going to sweep through the most significant ones and evaluate their impact for especially SME companies in Europe looking to take advantage of this developing technology.
As far as the platforms are concerned, Facebook is definitely making the biggest statement about their future as the company changed its name to “Meta” as in metaverse. Clearly, Meta is the worldwide leader in consumer-grade VR technology and the VR gaming ecosystem as their Quest platform, store, content and developer community combination is really reaching the point of a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Microsoft is still well positioned to take charge of the enterprise sector and keeps on integrating XR technology into their mainstream platforms to enable easy and cost-effective use for their existing customers. In early 2021 they released Mesh and in late 2021 they announced that 3D avatars will be available in Teams in the first half of 2022 which is laying the groundwork for “immersive meetings”.
Varjo, a Finnish high-end XR headset manufacturer, also launched their Teleport VR service and Varjo Reality Cloud, a step towards becoming a true end-to-end service provider in the metaverse space instead of just a hardware manufacturer.
Rumors go that Apple is cooking (pun intended) something behind the scenes and we’ll see whether they launch something this year or in the future. During the last years Google seems to have been mainly cutting their XR efforts except for the ARCore capabilities on their Android phones. However, taking into account the strategic importance of this paradigm shift, they’ll definitely keep themselves well positioned, at least internally and core technologies, in relation to other major players.
Even though the major players are investing a great deal of resources to develop core technologies, we still face the reality that large scale implementations are tedious or prohibitively expensive. VAMR project* contributors created a University-Business Cooperation Handbook that goes into details in various perspectives regarding specific use cases and will provide a more comprehensive picture about the overall situation.
From the SME perspective the key to taking advantage of these technologies really boils down to agility and experimentation. Value extraction depends on matching the use case and the technology correctly - which might not be an obvious task. Sometimes actual use case requirements are found out after doing experiments, thus proceeding in an agile manner definitely pays off.
Some concrete starting points for an SME looking to understand this technology and begin their XR journey would be to:
Contact an expert and discuss your needs and ideas (e.g. from VAM Realities Network)
Try out a Quest device and some applications available form the Oculus Store
Check out some actual use cases from the VAM Realities Handbook
After gathering some initial experience and understanding of the possibilities of the technology, it is time to start to gather ideas and concrete use cases inside the company. Starting small also makes sense here. Bringing a 3D model into VR or AR is an easy first step and further enhancing it for marketing, sales or training purposes is a great second step. 2022 is a perfect time to start the journey.
*VAM Realities project is about bringing core XR technology understanding and possibilities for SME manufacturing companies in Europe. Partners in nine countries have been working hard on creating assets that enable these manufacturing companies to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. https://vam-realities.eu/