Bernard Marr - Extended Reality in Practice: 100+ Amazing Ways Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality are Changing Business and Society

BERNARD MARR

This edition first published 2021.

2021 by Bernard Marr

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119695172 (hardback)

ISBN 9781119699385 (ebk)

ISBN 9781119699378 (epub)

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To my wife Claire, and my children, Sophia, James, and Oliver; and everyone who will use the amazing XR technologies to make our world a better place.

I've always wondered whether other people see the world in the same way as me. And I mean that literally, not figuratively. Do other people see the color green in the same way as I see it, for example? Do I see things exactly the same as everyone else, or am I experiencing something unique to me? After all, what is reality, anyway? Isn't reality different for all of us?

I may never know for sure whether I see the color green in exactly the same way as others. But what I can do what we can all increasingly do is embrace this notion of a reality that's unique to me. This is possible thanks to extended reality (or XR for short).

XR blurs the boundaries between the real world and the digital world, meaning it can be used to create more personalized, unique experiences. For now, this is mostly used to create immersive experiences in marketing, education, tourism and the like. But in the future, it could extend to all aspects of life as we know it to the point where each one of us could potentially transform the real world around us into something personalized, using special glasses, headsets, or maybe even contact lenses and implants. Let's say you hate the garish paint job your neighbors have done on the exterior of their home. In the future, your glasses could change it for you, and you'll see whatever color house you choose. Or let's say you see an impressive building and want to know who designed it and when it was built. Your glasses will be able to tell you, overlaying the info directly in front of your eyes (or you'll be able to point your phone camera at the building and see the relevant info onscreen).

Increasingly, our experience of the world will take place in this blurred area between the real world and the digital one. If you think of the time people spend on social media, crafting their online persona, it's clear the line between the digital world and the real one has already become pretty porous. XR will accelerate this. If that sounds a little ominous, it's not. I believe XR is going to change our world and transform our businesses for the better. As the examples in this book show, it's already happening.

To be clear, this isn't a tech book. It's not about how to build XR experiences. It's about real-world applications, and the incredible possibilities of XR, now and in the future. It looks at how XR is already being used in practice, across a range of different industries, and what these state-of-the-art applications might mean for the future. I've therefore written the book with business leaders in mind, but hope that anyone interested in this huge tech trend will find inspiring food for thought in these pages.

As a futurist, it's my job to look ahead, identify transformative tech trends and tell people about those trends as they begin to burst into the mainstream. It's something I've done before with key trends like artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. Given that XR is predicted to become a $209 billion market by 2022, I'd earmarked it as another burgeoning trend to watch closely.

That's to say I planned this book before the coronavirus crisis hit, and started writing while under lockdown in the UK. During lockdown, it became even more obvious that XR is a tech trend rapidly on the rise and that the technology will now be fast-tracked by many companies.

What was already a trend before COVID-19 quickly became a way of life for many, giving businesses a vital way to maintain connections between people, from the comfort (and safety) of their homes. Pretty much overnight, people who had previously gone to work in an office were conducting daily video calls from home (with increasingly impressive virtual backgrounds), and new tools surfaced that simulate the experience of working in an office environment. Argodesign's artificial window concept is just one example. It's an LCD screen that goes on the wall and looks like a window with the shade pulled down but if you pull up the shade, you see a colleague (or colleagues) through the window. You can even chit-chat and make awkward eye contact, just like in a real office.

Virtual conferences are another good example. As traveling to in-person conferences was suddenly no longer an option, virtual conference experiences like those provided by VirBELA stepped in to bridge the gap with immersive online conferences, right down to the breakout sessions.

Many experts, myself included, believe coronavirus will change the very nature of work, tipping the balance in favor of more remote working. Which means our lives will become ever more digital, and those digital experiences will need to become even more realistic. Interactions between the real world and the digital world will become all the more seamless. The boundaries between the real and the virtual will further blur.