What we’ve noticed: How businesses impacted by COVID-19 are using virtual and augmented reality
With the global pandemic unfolding still and the increasing move to social distancing and remote working for many as a business working in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR) software development we thought it might be useful to share with you some of our observations on how some businesses are turning to XR to enable business continuity.
Property display & Staging
Increasing interest: Over the last few weeks we have seen an increase of interest from residential and commercial property developers from Australia and South East Asia in particular wanting to know how they can best leverage XR to support the sales process.
The principal pain point is this. Most have physical display homes but now customers can’t travel and visit the display homes.
Also while some developers may already offer “virtual tours” these are mainly through using 360 video (not VR) and lack the interactivity, immersiveness and data capture required to support the sales process to the level now needed.
We’re directing these businesses to our productXR engage, which was built specifically to enable developers to place end users (customers) in a rich, interactive immersive virtual experience of a built environment.
XR engage is also been used in infrastructure public and stakeholder engagement for communicating design intent and receiving feedback on design options.
Virtual training
Urgent need for virtual training solutions: Another area we have noticed a surge of interest is in the development and provison of virtual training experiences across soft skills and technical (hard) skills. This is across Australia but also Europe.
For many businesses who provide technical or soft skills training the current inability to provide training in a classroom or group based environment, as they may have done previously, means an urgent need to look for alternative – virtual – solutions.
We are directing these inquiries to our product XR learn which provides an enterprise grade solution to all these questions.
– What you need to know on virtual training
Learnings needed: However, we have also noticed that there is still some confusion among many learning and development professionals in organisations about what is XR and ‘virtual reality’ (no 360 video is not true “VR”); how best to deploy a virtual learning solution at scale across an organisation and how best to deploy virtual training in an environment with an increasingly remote and distributed workforce.
Get the whitepaper: If you would like a copy of our soon to be released whitepaper to help you be better informed on transforming technical and soft skills training using virtual reality you can
Also in a few weeks organisations will be able to access the first of four innovative immersive virtual reality training modules for safety related training.
Training modules are provided by our industry partner JBHXR and are powered by Snobal and include CPR, First Aid in an ESI Environment, Pole Top Rescue and Low Voltage Rescue.
Questions on scaling
Need for an enterprise grade XR solution: One of the key questions business ask is how they can best scale XR across their organisation whether it is for virtual learning or for enriching client and public engagement.We understand that few businesses wants a stand alone VR or AR environment or solution with limited access to updates and support. That’s why we’ve built all our XR products (including XR learn and XR engage) to be based off our cloud platform – Snobal Cloud.
Snobal Cloud makes it easy for organisations to create, deliver and analyse virtual experiences. It also makes it easy for business to scale any virtual environment or experience across the organisation and across diverse physical locations.
Finally one of the things we are all acutely aware of with COVID-19 is the scale of the impact on so many businesses – large and small – from so many sectors. If there is a way XR and other digital technologies can enable businesses across diverse sectors to survive and even thrive during these challenging and unprecedented times then that would be a good thing.
We hope this was helpful. If there is any questions you have on any of the above please don’t hesitate to