JUNE 2019CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM9The Diminishing Issue of VR/AR's Scalabilitythe technology, the more comfortable and accepting we become of it which itself leads to greater adoption and so the cycle continues.Distributing VR/AR applications via user mobile devices can save organizations a significant chunk of cost. Plus, as smartphones get smarter, they will be increasingly able to support the richer, more complex features usually only associated with high-end VR/AR headsets.A New Breed of Standalone VR Headsets Will Make Things SimplerIn 2018, standalone headsets like Oculus Go piqued public interest (accounting for 20.6 percent of the headset market in Q3 2018). Over the next few months, a more powerful version is due to be released: the Oculus Quest. Like the Vive Focus and Pico Neo, it promises to deliver an `all-in-one' immersive experience giving users the freedom to move in VR without the need to be connected to external processors or tracking systems.These headsets will cost approximately $400-$600 each which is far cheaper than current high-end solutions which require a powerful computer, extra peripherals and a load of cables, altogether tripling the above cost. This will make large-scale VR deployments less costly while remaining equally effective in a lot of cases. It will also reduce staff costs as these simple-to-set-up headsets require less technical oversight.The Future: A Business-as-Usual Device in EnterpriseVR/AR hardware is improving all the time and adoption of the technology is increasing. With the imminent release of a new genre of standalone VR headsets, in as little as six months we should see the cost-benefit equation balance in VR/AR's favor:· The functionality of the technology will improve· The business value of the technology will increase· The technology will be more widely understood· Complexity of setup will reduce· Cost will reduceUltimately, VR/AR is on a journey to becoming a more mainstream business solution akin to a laptop or mobile phone. Whether you are looking at VR/AR from a short-term or long-term perspective, the issue of scalability is minimizing and moving in line with other business-as-usual devices. VRARMobile devices can offer a cheap and feasible way to deploy virtual reality at scale. The solution consists of a case with two lenses that houses the mobile phone which runs the experience. In comparison to high-end, tethered headsets, mobile VR is more readily available, less costly and simpler to set up.The downside? Despite advances in smartphone processing power, they're still unable to match the capabilities of higher end headsets. VR content viewed via a mobile device is usually of a lower graphical quality with limited interactivity. Specifically, most mobile VR systems can track you looking around a space but not your movement in that space.For certain applications, mobile devices can offer a more scalable alternative to expensive augmented reality headsets. Technology behemoths Apple and Google both have tools to enable development of high-end augmented reality experiences on mobile devices. These are called ARKit and ARCore, respectively. Apple has reported that over 200 million phones have the technical specifications to run ARKit apps. Moreover, ARtillery Intelligence estimates that, by 2022, a whopping 3.4 billion handsets will be compatible with ARCore or ARKit. In other words, millions of users already own all the necessary hardware to run high-end augmented reality experiences (and this number is growing every day). Jeremy Dalton
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