Navigating Spatial Computing and Immersive Tech | Deloitte US has been saved
Authored by Dany Rifkin.
Extended reality (XR) has arrived
Deloitte’s Unlimited Reality team has just returned from the Augmented Enterprise Summit (AES), an annual independent enterprise XR conference that nearly doubled in size this year to accommodate the rapidly growing number of people dipping their toes into the world of immersive tech. Over the course of three days, the team spoke with more than 100 leaders who are actively experimenting with augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) to solve critical workforce and operational challenges. Over and over, in one-on-one conversations, on panels, in case studies, over meals and coffee, and just walking around, they heard the same thing: XR is officially here; it’s just stuck trying to cross the chasm.
First, the good news: XR is here, and opportunities abound
XR is already being used all around us. As most business leaders are well aware, to find product market fit, your technology should uniquely address a problem so profound that people are spending time and money hacking together wildly suboptimal solutions. Anyone who spends time in manufacturing, oil and gas, high tech, and other industrial sectors will likely tell you the same thing: Current knowledge management, safety training, and first-wave support tools are inconsistent, suboptimal, and constantly being solved through point solutions. Deloitte’s Unlimited Reality practice has identified the industrial metaverse as the most promising use case, doubling down on investments around end-to-end industrial solutions, including enterprise spatial data lakes, augmented worker solutions integrated with enterprise systems, and digital twin simulations for operational efficiency.
As we think about the future of work as it pertains to spatial computing and immersive tech, there are incredibly exciting opportunities across the talent life cycle—VR job simulations for talent acquisition, immersive onboarding experiences and persistent environments, collaboration in 3D spaces, etc. But the conversation business leaders most often want is around VR training and AR for knowledge augmentation in the flow of work. Right now, that’s where organizations are ready to experiment because that tends to be where the capital investment is manageable, the degree of disruption to work processes is typically limited, and the return on investment (ROI) is easy to calculate (for example, reduction in safety incidents, reduction in travel costs).
Now, the challenge: Navigating the years ahead
It’s a tale as old as time. Every technology innovation struggles to move from early adopters to the mainstream. It’s a product-market fit challenge, a marketing challenge, and an adoption challenge rolled into one. This is the challenge XR hardware and software providers are facing, but it’s easily applicable to enterprise scale as well. XR (and especially AR) is a complex technology that will likely take time to reach maturity and mass adoption. In some cases, engineers are trying to hack literal physics. So, how should organizations navigate the next few years?
- Recognize that your early adopters and early majority don’t have the same needs. This is mostly a challenge XR hardware providers are facing, but it’s also a critical challenge for enterprise leaders thinking about moving from pilot projects to scaled deployments. A pilot can be designed to solve a very niche use case with very specific boundaries and key performance indicators. Scaling the technology means solving multiple problems, investing in a large fleet of novel hardware, and considering mobile device management and enterprise system integration. Take the time to understand your entire stakeholder landscape, ensuring your plan for scale addresses critical needs across stakeholder groups and offers a clear path to ROI, whether quantitative or qualitative. It must also be flexible enough to adjust as the technology landscape changes.
- Tech on its own doesn’t solve problems. Another lesson the team has learned having been in and around the startup ecosystem for some time—and especially watching the explosion in generative AI interest when it became more accessible through chat—is that cool tech is cool, but it means nothing if you’re not considering the whole solution. What is your technology ecosystem around XR? What kinds of training and support systems have you put around it? What new policies and standards are required to reduce risk? And most importantly, is it being used to solve actual problems that end users have identified?
- Embed change management across your program. All of this leads to the team’s primary observation: Scaling XR is fundamentally an adoption problem. Think about the challenge here. If you’re implementing a new enterprise system, it usually requires months or years of change management support, even though often no new hardware is being introduced. In the case of XR, you’re introducing new hardware, new software, new processes, and new systems. It’s a wholesale change—a digital transformation 2.0. These considerations must be baked into your solution from day one.
The long journey ahead of us
Perhaps upcoming XR releases will blow us all out of the water, and the hype cycle does appear to be on the upswing. The team left AES with a profound belief in the metaverse, or spatial computing, or immersive tech—whatever you want to call it. And having been in and around the tumultuous space for years, we take that as a huge leap of faith. Use the lessons above to get ahead of the curve in this exciting new immersive frontier.
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