The new world of customer experience, discovery & commerce, that blends immersive content, design & technology is upon us. Terms like the web 3.0, metaverse and virtual worlds are upon us and buzzed around in board rooms. And many of the XR experiences have already been a part and parcel of brands and their lives across applications. And it is getting bigger and better.
XR stands for “extended reality,” an umbrella term that covers VR, AR, and MR. XR covers the full spectrum of real and virtual environments.
First things first. Why does a metaverse matter?
We are moving into a hybrid world where the virtual, digital and immersive co-exists and co-operates with our physical world. They would be inter-operable. Did we see a glimpse of extreme possibilities in the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix?
The shared notion of the Metaverse could very well be the next internet, its next avatar - web 3.0. Experts say the metaverse is simply the internet, updated to accommodate spatial experiences. Virtual assets can earn real monies.
"Alongside a three-dimensional VR metaverse, there’s another similar concept that’s gaining traction: Web 3.0. Leslie Shannon, Nokia’s Head of Trend Scouting, mentioned this in a VRARA Global Summit talk, speaking about the importance of the metaverse or a spatial internet" - XR Today (Source)
Mark Zuckerberg is betting his future on the metaverse calling it the “embodied internet” in his Founder’s Letter. It is believed that Deloitte has prepped a framework for the spatial web and Web 3.0. Epic Games announced a $1 billion in investment to build the metaverse, back in April 2021. Morgan Stanley reckons its the next bright investment arena. Decentraland: The Metaverse's Early Mover has grown its users by 3,300% over the past year and reached a peak market cap of $12 billion. You could very well join your own dots.
All of this points in one direction: the metaverse could well be the next major online destination where customers, fans, followers and businesses congregate to share, browse, work, play, buy, sell and exchange.
VR, a precondition for the metaverse?
Source - GMW3 "The idea that the metaverse and VR are inseparable is well-founded. The earliest formulation of the term, in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, described a virtual space accessed by VR displays. That dystopian vision of the metaverse is very different to the one that is being sold today, and yet the core fact of it being accessed via VR lives on in platforms such as Somnium Space or Horizon Worlds. But is it true that VR is a prerequisite for entering the metaverse? Just look at two of the most popular virtual worlds in the form of The Sandbox and Decentraland. Both have described themselves as “metaverses” and they offer virtual spaces which users can interact with in the form of virtual avatars. What they don’t offer is a way of embodying that avatar in virtual reality as of yet, instead favouring a more traditional, game-like experience."
Getting started with XR and an immersive universe
But for brands there could be more intermediate steps as the form and rules of the metaverse and web 3.0 are still being established. Let's get back to XR and its possibilities for industry and applications.
Your brand and its customer experience must never be still.
No two ways about it. It is the experience that makes or breaks a brand. The experience is what the customer summarises about you and the brand. It is how they are treated across the different points of the continuum that determines the quality of the customer journey. That's where the rubber hits the road.
86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. As per a PWC study, customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 13% - 18% for luxury and indulgence services, simply by receiving a great customer experience. A Walker study found that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
In a digital first era, "virtualizing" matters even more.
The Customer Experience is never a constant, it evolves with time and technology with audiences and their habits.
We stand today in 2022, a post pandemic world. In a world going digital, contactless and immersive, and one where your brand needs to be lived and experienced both on ground as also social and digital, this becomes even more prominent. It took a pandemic to drive home some truths about the need to digitize and virtualize key sections of the customer journeys.
Customers are gravitating towards immersive experiences.
The best experience is one which brings the customer inside a story that the customer is in charge of. This is a CX which helps the customer navigate her way through delightful moments of engagement, interaction, information that both informs as also inspires her purchase choices.
It is time to bend reality. It is time to adapt and evolve.
That augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality is here to stay and make our experiences as customers more immersive, engaging and more fulsome is a fact. But making sure that it fits in seamlessly with the customer experience journey and the brand narrative is critical. Metaverse, NFT, VR, AR and holo-worlds shouldn't be thought of as the new toys, but rather as intelligent and intuitive extensions of your brand's experience. Helping you engaging in newer ways with a wider base of customers and fans.
Over the years the possibilities and canvas for XR has become multi-dimensional - gaming, shopping, discovery, healthcare, training, empathy education and more. Not the quick, experimental and gimmicky stuff but something well thought out that genuinely adds a significant layer to the consumer’s experience and engagement with the brand.
What can help?
The good thing about the exponential power of technology is that you are never too late to start. With experience architects & designers working by your side, it is possible to seamlessly onboard these technologies in your brand's customer experience journey.
Connect with an XR Universe at Immersion.
The right connections and folks can help you reimagine your brand's experience journeys and help add an XR dimension to it. Immersion is a platform that brings together futurists & change makers, brands and enterprise, content creators and start up players to come together and build the change. Immersion's network has amazing thinkers, creators, startups and firms that are shaping the immersive world in India - right from design and content to hardware & technologies.
This universe of changemakers, XR brands, content creators, start up firms, marketers can help make your adventure smooth and absolutely hassle free. As venture designers we work them to reimagine brands and their immersive citizenship. And it has truly helped in imagining and designing new possibilities.
One of our later adventures, was at Hornbill to help the state government's arts and music ministry to experience the power of immersive VR content up close. Our partners in their industry journeys have led experience design projects where VR and connected experiences on ground, have led to beautiful outcomes.
This is ably supported by a network of experience designers, content curators, post production & FX specialists, sound scientists and social marketing experts that help ensure that your XR adventures are amplified and presented in full suite armor.
NYUCT Design Labs, co - designed and co-built India’s first international platform for XR & Immersive technologies. Immersion is a platform that brings together futurists & change makers, brands and enterprise, content creators and start up players to come together and build the change . It serves as a pulpit for the biggest, brightest and sharpest immersive technology players to share their knowledge and expertise with industry and brands. Immersion was presented by Dell and Intel.
As the next edition of Immersion gears up we would love to hear from leading brands and businesses at the edge of the XR revolution to be a part of this community and forum.
NEXT
Using the NEXT framework of customer journey, discovery and content navigation, your customer's mobile becomes the storyteller for your brand.
NEXT as an experience design approach is imagined to bring your inert, still assets including walls and buildings roaring back to life. A calibrated experience design & tailored approach can transform your content, make it productive. XR led discoveries are wonderful for experiential brands and spaces - cities, airports, museums, hotels, retail brands, galleries, complexes and more. These physical addresses can virtually come alive to tell brand new stories. Contextually. It can dramatically change how visitors experience and interact with your address, without you investing in more manpower/services.
It makes advertising, content and storytelling contextual and data intelligent. While being mobile.
Connect with us to find out how NEXT can reimagine your customer experience
Join the next edition of Immersion as it gears up. We would love to hear from leading brands and businesses at the edge of the XR revolution to be a part of this platform, think-fest and forum. Immersion has several branded opportunities and experiential capsules to present your brand as a thought leader and present its experience adventures.
