The Benefits of XR for Collaboration in 2022
Extended reality, the umbrella term covering Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR), is gaining rapid attention around the world. Once considered a novel tool for entertainment, XR has now emerged as a potential must-have for the future workplace.
Capable of bridging gaps between distributed teams, empowering creativity, and unlocking new levels of productivity, XR is taking every industry by storm. Indeed, research suggests the market will be growing at a phenomenal rate of around 57.91% between 2022 and 2027.
While XR has potential for everything from enhanced training opportunities to amazing customer service, one of the most powerful areas for this technology is collaboration.
XR collaboration tools are perfectly-suited to the age of hybrid work, and ideal for cultivating productivity in any environment. Let’s explore the top reasons to buy XR collaboration tools in 2022.
1. Strengthen Team Relationships
The significant shift to the age of remote and hybrid working has delivered a number of benefits to business leaders, including cost savings, and increased access to global talent. However, distributed teams can also make it difficult for managers to cultivate strong company culture, facilitate team relationships, and strengthen engagement.
XR solutions could be the answer to keeping your team members connected and invested in your workforce, wherever they are. This will be particularly true in the future of the “Metaverse” where collaboration tools will allow people to bring avatars of themselves or digital identities into a virtual world for deeper, more meaningful interactions.
Whether through MR holograms, AR projects, or VR avatars, the presence created by XR allows for more meaningful, emotional interactions in any team.
As the technology available in this ecosystem continues to evolve, we’re even seeing the arrival of new tools capable of tracking facial movements and expressions.
2. Enhanced Meeting Quality
The new age of work has prompted a massive increase in daily meetings. Currently, professionals are averaging around 25.6 meetings a week.
While video conferencing can help to bridge the gap between teams and strengthen human connections, those who keep their cameras on consistently can generally feel more drained by the end of the day.
Over time, excessive meetings can lead to fatigue and disengagement in meetings, which means less participation in conversations, and fewer meaningful outcomes from each interaction. With XR, it’s possible to overcome this issue.
Being “plugged in” to an XR meeting gives us a way to connect meaningfully with colleagues, without the stress of Zoom fatigue. It’s also a far more fun and engaging way to discuss ideas, get guidance from peers, and explore ideas with contextual input in the form of 3D graphs, digital twins, and documents.
3. Faster Prototyping and Development
Many forms of collaboration in different industries involve experimenting with different ideas and concepts, using prototypes, sketches, and endless in-person meetings.
Unfortunately, in today’s landscape, it’s not always possible to bring all the specialists required for a valuable “production” meeting together in the same place at the same time.
XR can fix this problem, by allowing team members and specialists from all over the world to step into the meeting environment, and interact with products, concepts, and prototypes as though they were real items.
A VR collaboration tool aligned with CAD modelling technology can allow companies to create 3D digital twins of products, for team members to work on in real-time, regardless of where they’re located. MR and AR tools can allow users to explore designs in greater depth, providing a level of visualisation which helps us to discover issues and correct problems quickly.
XR and digital twin technology allows us to prototype, design, and innovate more rapidly than ever before. We can pull an idea out of a screen, walk around it at full scale, move within it, and get a better feal for everything from form to proportion.
4. Reductions in Cost and Waste
Most companies looking at XR collaboration tools get caught up in the initial costs of investing in XR technology, like headsets and specialist software. However, this environment can actually lead to significant cost-savings in the long-term.
First, companies can reduce the amount of travel employees need to do to connect with other specialist and team members during collaborative work. Teams can be distributed all over the world and still work together in an immersive, productive environment.
Secondly, the assets and tools users interact with in an XR world don’t have a direct impact on the real world. Users can experiment with different materials in designs and create dozens of different versions of prototypes without wasting any real-world resources or materials.
The agile environment created by XR makes it possible to produce new ideas at scale, without having to spend a fortune on travel and materials.
5. Improved Collaborative Training
The collaborative XR environment could even help to power the next generation of collaborative training and mentorship. With an MR headset, for instance, it’s possible for an employee to receive step-by-step guidance and support from supervisor or specialist as they work on a project. This allows for hands-on skill development, without requiring multiple people to be present in one environment.
XR solutions allow employees to reach out for help and receive guided workflow assistance wherever they are in the field, or within the business environment.
Many modern XR collaboration tools even come with built-in features to make this easier. For instance, Microsoft Mesh works alongside Microsoft Teams and Dynamics Remote Assist.
The Microsoft Mesh headset therefore allows users to access various snapshots, live videos, and MR annotations to enable collaboration between people behind a desk and those in the workplace. The use of video streaming means two people can share the same view, and work together on solving problems more efficiently.
XR is the Future of Collaboration
While XR in collaboration is still a growing concept, it seems to be one of the best examples of how extended reality technology can transform the future workforce. With XR in collaboration, we can empower teams to be more productive, efficient, and cost-effective than ever.
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