Immerse your company in a new reality to augment sales (2024)

If you’re not sure what immersive technologies such as virtual or augmented reality could do for your business, picture the humble deck of cards. Playing cards have been around for more than a millennium, the product of a ninth-century Chinese innovation: woodblock printing. They have stayed pretty much the same ever since.

But now Pink Kong Studios, a Dublin animation company, is working on a project that will take a deck of cards to a whole new level, using augmented reality to bring each card character to life.

“You can play the card game on its own without any technology but the AR enhances the user experience,” Niamh Herrity, Pink Kong’s co-founder and head of production, says.

The same could be said about MeetingRoom, a provider of virtual reality meeting spaces that enhances remote team working. It has 13,900 sq m of virtual office space “let” to three Fortune 500 companies, as part of its “beta testing”, and is poised to scale up.

Not only has the Covid pandemic normalised remote meetings but climate change is driving demand too, according to MeetingRoom founder Jonny Cosgrove, as companies look to cut the costs — both financial and environmental — of bringing teams together.

The use of virtual reality headsets enables staff at his clients’ companies to meet in virtual spaces as avatars. Their virtual surroundings can be custom designed, or be a digital twin of their real-life office. Once in, they get a 360-degree viewpoint and hear directional sound from attendees on either side of them, as in real life.

“It has proven really good for collaborative work such as ideation and brainstorming,” says Cosgrove, who reckons that immersive technologies represent the next wave of the internet. “It’s a bit like the iPhone moment — you won’t see it happening until it has happened.”

Nigel O’Leary set up Dimension88 in 2018, to develop digital twins of buildings. These are used by developers looking to raise finance and to show buyers around show houses via virtual reality.

He can even give prospective buyers a VR tour of yet to be built apartments, using drones to furnish the exact view outside each one.

Once a building is complete, its digital twin can then add value to facilities managers, with augmented reality enabling them to see through walls and panels to cabling and ducting systems beneath, to repair faults or reconfigure offices, for example. O’Leary believes the applications are immense. AR could revolutionise tech support, for example.

“You simply point your phone at the back of your router and the support person can tell you what button to press, instead of sending someone out. You can do more and provide a better experience,” he says.

The events space is ripe for immersive technology too. “You might not be able to afford to go to the Dubai Grand Prix but what if you could put on a headset and meet your friends there? And immersive technology offers the potential for truly social media too. With VR you have the ability to meet family and friends in a shared space, watch a movie together and play board games,” O’Leary adds. Its dominance is only a matter of time, he says. “Our kids are used to immersive technology, to being avatars, from games. They won’t accept the web the way we use it.”

A report on the Irish immersive technology industry, published in April, values the sector at €43 million, employing 750 people. It identifies a number of challenges to its growth, including a skills gap, a lack of funds to capitalise on market opportunities, low awareness of the technology’s potential, and a lack of networking, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Ireland is also behind other countries in state investment in immersive technologies, the report says.

On the plus side, momentum is growing. The past two years have seen the establishment of the Immersive Technologies Skillnet — which focuses on training and development, and which published the report — and of Eirmersive, a membership group that aims to give the sector a voice.

“We are still at the beginning of this. Part of what the report aimed to do was to find out what the next steps are to facilitate growth,” Susan Talbot, network manager of the Immersive Technologies Skillnet, says.

The sector emerged out of the gaming and animation industries but is now being propelled by factors such as lower-priced headsets and the rollout of 5G broadband.

“All of this, including 3D technology and interactive multiplayer game technology, is coming together now into what’s called Web3 or the metaverse,” Talbot says.

The advent of blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens means trading can now be done across multiple platforms, another vital piece of the jigsaw.

The race is on to educate businesses about the opportunities. “At the moment just driving greater awareness is the challenge because of the newness of the sector, the difficulty disseminating use cases and just getting people to get their hands on the technology to see what’s possible,” Talbot says.

Slowly but surely, however, both VR and AR are already “leaking into every sector, from architecture to education, construction and healthcare to manufacturing”, she adds. “It feels like we are on the cusp of jumping the chasm on this and all the global reports are saying the same thing — jump into the metaverse or be left behind.”

Allen Wixted set up Plop in 2018, using augmented reality to allow shoppers to drop a piece of furniture into their home via their mobile phone screen, to see what it would look like in situ. It is used by retailers such as Michael Murphy Home Furnishing and EZ Living in Ireland, as well as by Plop customers in the UK.

Not only does it enhance the customer experience but it pays dividends for the retailer too. Tests have shown that online shoppers have much higher customer conversion rates with the AR service than without it. “They are two to four times more likely to buy,” Wixted says.

Geoff Allen’s company Avatar Academy develops virtual reality training solutions for the medtech sector, using software that can capture hand motions in 3D, without special gloves, using just a headset. It cuts the cost of laboratory training significantly.

His plan is to develop a learning experience platform that uses artificial intelligence to support each trainee’s development on a bespoke basis.

“It will halve their training time,” Allen says. “The cost savings will be mind-numbing. It’s computer games rebuilt. It’s the whole new paradigm for industry — and training is only the tip of it.”

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