The Business Of XR: Where The Pandemic Has Left Us
For some of us, the world has been opening up once again, moving gently from virtual back to in-person. Reflecting on the last year, the world — businesses and consumers alike — have shifted toward embracing more of what’s virtual. Virtual was our reality (and still sort of is). We saw a lot of ingenuity from businesses in how they’ve adapted to continue their mission — whether it’s been to entertain, to educate, to socialize, or even simply to work. Alongside the all-too ubiquitous video platforms, XR and 3D real-time experiences played a role in keeping us all sane across a number of sectors, from retail, to live events, to museums, and more.
Here are a few trends of note:
More Investment in Virtual Programming and Experiences
There could not be a greater understatement than a collective proclaimed wish that the pandemic had never occurred. However, for businesses and organizations, if there was a silver lining to be had, it would be in the form of an increased engagement of a wider, global audience base.
Whether you are a luxury retail brand, a musical artist, a conference, or a museum, chances are, you increased your production of virtual programming and digital presence in the last year. It made sense, given the fact that average daily global online content consumption apparently doubled in 2020.
And when there’s more virtual programming and content for everyone, whether they’re five miles away, or 5000 miles away, there’s a parity drawn and a shared experience across the global audience. Suddenly, the added effort into the quality of your product launch event, your virtual museum tour, or your virtual concert reaches a broader constituency. There’s more content to engage those tourists from São Paulo who visited your museum once and have still been on your email list or follow you on social media. They’re now showing up on your Zoom museum tours in the box next to that family who lives a mile away and has been a museum regular for generations. Overall, the global virtual events market, including business events, is still expected to grow significantly after 2020.
Consumer Behavior Shifts Toward New Experiences
Pair all of that with a general consumer behavior that’s willingly shifted toward giving new types of virtual experiences a chance, and this opens up a whole new world for greater demand for higher quality virtual experiences. Zoom’s been OK, but what else is there? XR has yielded more options for artists to connect with fans. Oculus Venues has launched a concert series with interactive features, and audiences can access Sony Music and Verizon’s Madison Beer Immersive Reality Concert Experience through VR, as well as pixel-streamed via the cloud for easy, wide web access to a high production value CG concert. The theater world also experimented with live shared VR experiences, such as Tender Claws, which performed The Tempest live for global audiences, time zones be damned.
Some businesses and organizations may even have been able to find new revenue streams to engage this new, wider virtual audience. They learned what audiences were willing to pay for virtual versions of previously in-person only experiences, such as the all-virtual, on-demand Tomorrowland, which reached about 1 million paid attendees for the July 2020 concert. (Tickets started at €20 and went up from there, depending on the package.) This was successful enough to repeat for New Years’ Eve 2020, and planned for this summer’s Tomorrowland, which will be virtual once again, with the intent of the digital Tomorrowland becoming an annual fête. There’s also been the chance for some organizations that otherwise may not be as digitally-oriented to gauge demand for paid virtual tours and classes at museums — from visitors anywhere in the world.
Increased Interest in Hybrid Experiences as Long-Term Strategy
As parts of the world begin to transition back into in-person events and activities, the question remains as to how to best proceed from here. If you were the kind of enterprising business or organization with a staff that worked like crazy to innovate and engage a wider global audience, it’s an inflection point to figure out what to do. It’s likely that you invested quite a bit in the programming itself, if not the marketing to draw more audiences in. What now, for the sake of retention of this wider audience?
There’s an opportunity to create virtual content and experiences to engage both remote and in-person audiences. Hybrid experiences, utilizing the best of XR, stands to be a promising medium to accomplish this. Defaulting to the traditional broadcast of a concert or a sports match is familiar to audiences, but the year of video calls, inherently 2D and limited in interactivity and true community feel, has left us all wanting more. In contrast, hybrid experiences leveraging XR can provide remote fans with interactivity and immersion.
For some sectors, such as live events, virtual may be a short-term substitute for the real-deal in-person experience. But it would also be a good long-term complement. Continued investment in virtual would enable businesses and organizations to engage that wider global audience gained over the last year. Continuing to offer a robust virtual experience helps retain the increase in global audiences who may not have easy access to the physical on-site experience even in pre-pandemic times. As businesses slowly regain their in-person attendees, retaining that remote audience becomes a net gain for them. Hybrid experiences become an overall win-win situation for audiences that demand them and for businesses alike.
Furthermore, even events currently returning to in-person attendance are set at limited capacity with phased re-openings. And while we hope that pandemic conditions improve across the world, public health officials warn of a likely “dimmer” scenario, where potentially businesses will have to nimbly adjust their in-person capacities. Many stadiums, such as Premier League club Tottenham’s new stadium, have been using tools such as crowd-density apps and IoT to monitor and manage capacities and fan experiences. However, some fans may be reluctant to return to in-person experiences at all.
Instead of one-off activations, it makes sense to have a strategy that’s evergreen and preserves the best of what may have been gained in the last year (the wider audience, their capacity for virtual experiences, and potential new revenue streams).
What’s Next
Overall, in all the ways that the pandemic has changed us, there’s also an opportunity to define new, next-level virtual experiences. Experiences for in-person and virtual no longer have to be an either/or proposition. With XR, we can use digital layers to enhance the experience for in-person audiences, digital twins to immerse remote audiences, and hybrid experiences to bring them together.
Of course, the challenge lies in the execution to create hybrid events that are satisfyingly immersive, interactive, and can provide that all-too elusive sense of community that seems artificially gained in a video call, yet hollow. After a year of virtual everything (entertainment, education, work), our standards as consumers are collectively a whole lot higher. For businesses and organizations, the opportunity is expansive. The world is within reach. Putting together a strategy with consistent, high-quality experiences for consumers, driven by seamless, reliable technologies will be key to success.
