The immersive world is set to be a mainstream reality

The AR/VR space is booming as new innovations and technologies are coming into picture. As of now, this space has broadly brought two senses into the digital world: Hearing and seeing in a three-dimensional virtual world. In the future, innovations in this space will make it possible for humans to even taste and smell in the virtual world.

With the rapid digitization induced by Covid-19, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality gained prominence. The travel industry was one of the early adopters of these technologies. Ever since then, the market has been leveraging AR and VR for increasing bookings and enhancing customer experiences.

Transformations such as "try before you buy," "virtual demos of hotel properties," "contactless check-in and check-out," "fetching real-time information about destinations," and so on have been made possible by immersive technologies. With time, their application in the travel industry is only set to increase.

It is predicted that nearly 75% of the world's population will be actively and routinely engaging with AR by 2025. According to a global shopping study, 1 in 4 shoppers said they would actually prefer to use AR to try on clothes virtually rather than in-store, all big indicators of AR becoming a mainstream reality. Businesses using AR-try on tell us it leads to less returns, which is good for the bottom line and the environment.

AR and VR have brought many cutting-edge innovations in various industries. They are not confined to just gaming, but have evolved so much that now leading brands are adopting technology and upgrading themselves. Some of the current trends in AR/VR space are:

AR/VR in Education and Training: The introduction of AR/VR in education has brought a new perspective on the table, enabling students to experience immersive learning and visualize in the virtual world. Resulting in creation of a focused environment, ensuring higher engagement and better concept understanding.

VR in the Medical Industry: VR has changed the game of how the medical industry works. Often, people tend to stress before surgeries or to go through any medical treatment, but with VR, the doctors can show the process to gain the trust of an individual. Moreover, the students can practice in the VR environment, brushing up on the areas that need improvement.

Nihar Sripad Madkaiker, Co-Founder of iXR Labs

In the past year there has been an increased focus on making the technology a lot more user friendly. With a lot of focus on lighter hardware by the use of pancake lenses, or through software interventions such as gesture control. We have seen an increased move towards merging AR/VR into Mixed Reality (MR). The Meta Quest Pro is a testament to the same. Additionally, we could see the software applications also moving towards MR as it is expected to have faster and wider acceptance.

AR/VR in Defence: VR is opening doors for numerous crucial skill training. Defence is another use case where VR is providing an opportunity to the military personnel to get ready for diverse and dangerous environments in a safe space before jumping into the real war.

AR-based Remote Assistance: The introduction of AR-based remote assistance is doing wonders in various fields. The brand agents can now guide and collaborate with the technicians, customers, and other users to resolve issues instantly with absolutely no geographical restrictions.

VR House Tours: The power of VR has touch based with real estate too, enabling buyers and sellers to interact and take luxury tours of the new properties with the help of virtual reality.

VR Showroom Tours: Many companies are now creating virtual tours of their showrooms in the VR space to provide immersive experiences to the customers. The digital replicas include a 360 degree view of the showrooms along with info pop-ups, floor plans, brochures, etc.

• 2023 will see some successful experiments with interoperability standards across virtual worlds. A genuinely interoperable metaverse would see every developer using the same standards to manage identity and entitlements across their virtual worlds. Alas, from our vantage point at the outset of 2023, that reality is but a far-off vision. Still, we expect that early adopters of the metaverse will experience limited interoperability across a few destinations for the first time. This will be a small step in a long sprint, but an important one nonetheless, as it will give the world a glimpse of a potential future for online interactivity.

• In 2023, we will see more virtual worlds vie for your attention on the browser. One of the biggest blockers to the proliferation of the metaverse is accessibility. VR adoption is still in its infancy and many users are unwilling to download dedicated apps when their attention could be spent elsewhere with significantly less effort (read: friction). This presents a conundrum for metaverse developers, as the potential for more genuine online interpersonal interactions is an oft-touted value proposition for spending time in virtual worlds. Although some examples of web-based 3D virtual worlds are out there, we expect that 2023 will see established and new players offering browser access to their metaverse destinations to grow their user bases.

• 2023 will see Augmented Reality (AR) use cases become as commonplace as QR codes did in recent years. 2022 saw Niantic’s acquisition of WebAR development platform, 8th Wall; the release of Nreal AR glasses in the west; the popularization of colour pass-through in VR headsets like the Pico and Meta’s Oculus Pro. Going into 2023, we expect that AR will shine a new perspective on 3D interactivity as it becomes increasingly common in both commercial and enterprise scenarios alike, such that, by year’s end, most users will be at least somewhat familiar with the technology.

Ranga Jagannath, Senior Director, Agora

Going into 2023, we expect that AR will shine a new perspective on 3D interactivity as it becomes increasingly common in both commercial and enterprise scenarios alike, such that, by year’s end, most users will be at least somewhat familiar with the technology.

AR/VRaugmented shopping will move out of the experimental phase and more prevalent in 2023 with more brands releasing apps such as virtual fitting rooms or apps to show how furniture will fit into their customer’s houses.

The last few years have been tough on everyone and tech has played a crucial role in keeping us connected. At the same time, there’s been more scrutiny on the impact of technology on people’s lives. By designing technology that’s connected to the real world you bring with it really important parts of humanity—creativity, friendship, love, joy.

Shopping experiences have evolved from being physical-first to being virtual-first for consumers. In the pursuit of making the experience as immersive as possible for consumers, brands have jumped from being physical-first to being virtual first.

One of the powerful tools that helps do this well is Augmented Reality which, in addition to reducing e-commerce limitations, enhances the online shopping journey by providing detailed product descriptions. AR aids this process by giving one a glimpse of how the product will look when placed in their own set up. AR renders endless possibilities and provides room for brands to showcase the offering creatively. According to a study by Deloitte, 94% of the customers are expected to use AR for shopping the same way they did in 2021, this year as well.

Lakshya Malu, Interim Head, Snap Inc. India

The use of Augmented Reality is endless. AR is being actively used in our mobile phones. Like how we take our AR tools and make them available to Samsung, for example, to put into their Android smartphones, or to Disney who embeds in their app so that you can bring your theme park experience to life with your favorite characters. More recently, Amazon's embedded our AR technology so you can try on products on their application. AR adoption is on pace with the mobile usage boom—by 2025, about 40% of the Gen Z and Millennial population in India will be frequent AR users

Virtual Reality will upscale our travel experiences altogether. The increasing demand and the reduced cost associated with adopting Virtual Reality solutions are certainly in its favour. And travel and tourism companies are extracting the maximum benefits out of this situation. Having said this, we currently live in a digital world but have always grown in an analog space. Hence, shifting the entire travel industry to immersive experiences won’t happen.

Majority of consumers prefer and in fact cherish on-ground experiences. The adrenaline rush, emotions and joy associated with travelling and exploring places physically is something they want to experience and virtual worlds cannot fulfil. And it's not only VR but even AR will emerge to be integral parts of the industry. 

Rikant Pittie, Co-Founder, EaseMyTrip

The industry players in the travel industry are increasingly investing in immersive technologies to increase awareness about different tour plans and tourist destinations.There is no doubt about the fact that AR and VR will transform the travel and tourism industry altogether in the future. With affordable VR headsets, AR glasses and immersive solutions being easily available, people will be able to travel right from the comfort of their homes with the help of immersive experiences. This could boost the travel industry significantly and even expand its reach to larger markets.

One big area wherein brands are investing in is how to extend AR from the smartphone into the world around us by using glasses as people feel somewhat restricted while using AR on a smartphone.The promise of glasses is that we can take those computing experiences and actually overlay them on the world around us in three dimensions, giving the flexibility to walk around and do a lot more. It's a more natural way to interact with computers than interacting with this tiny screen that we have today.

The future of consumer computing is wearable AR as it is far more immersive.

Abhishek Tomar, Co-founder & CTO, AjnaLens

AR/VR will definitely become more mainstream. VR can actually prove to be the center of digital transformation. We are already investing in virtual reality and it will soon boil down to the consumer market too. The consumer market is yet to see the replacement of computers with VR glasses.

Could AR/VR replace all devices/screens?

Augmented reality technology will probably break down the concept of a screen entirely. What we saw historically,10 to20 years ago, when people were using computing on a mainframe or a desktop computer, they viewed the Internet as a separate space. So they would go and live their day to day lives and then go log on to the internet and have a different experience.

Today, the Internet is completely integrated in our day to day lives, largely thanks to the smartphone, and so the Internet and the real world aren't a separate place. And in fact, all of the technology investment that has really gained traction, billions of people around the world, is about making technology lighter, more portable, better integrated in the world around you.

And so AR is really the continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for decades now of people wanting to better integrate computing in their lives and actually get the computing device out of the way so that they can be a part of the world around them.

So we can say that at least all the mobile screen could be easily replaced by AR/VR based tools in the near future. We might not need mobile phones, tablets, laptops etc, it could just be a pair of MR glasses that bring us all the information, social media, navigation, computing right in front of our eyes on a virtual screen. The key for this would be having highly portable MR devices, which are light, comfortable and seamlessly integrate with existing ecosystems.