![]() This will dramatically lower the barriers to entry for many businesses wanting to deploy XR solutions without making large infrastructure investments. Gaming has tended to act as the testbed for much of the VR technology that’s currently permeating other industries such as healthcare and education, so we can expect similar solutions aimed at other use cases to emerge during 2022. Plutosphere, for example, and other startups offering similar services, let users stream VR games from cloud servers, eliminating the need for users to own expensive gaming PCs packed with powerful graphics hardware in order to enjoy home VR. This is likely to include the large data volumes needed to run XR, making wireless and cloud-based VR and AR a possibility. Currently offering speeds around 20 times quicker than existing mobile networks, but with the potential to greatly increase that differential, the benefits aren’t just faster data transmission, but the possibility of different types of data and services. The 5G rollout is gathering pace, and 2022 is looking like it will be the year where uptake becomes widespread enough that it becomes a mainstream proposition. In real stores, we can expect more stores to be fitted with AR technologies such as virtual mirrors that allow customers to try on many different items without having to take the time to get changed or even actually touch any products! When they find items they like, they can simply be directed towards where they will be found on the shelves. VR allows online retail experiences far beyond what is possible with typical e-commerce websites – for example, customers can "try on" jewelry and clothing using digital avatars and engage in "personal shopper" interactions with chatbots. Meanwhile, in bricks ‘n’ mortar, AR technology can help customers find what they are looking for on the shelves and provide the type of information and feedback opportunities (for example, integrating customer reviews with in-store products) that shoppers have become used to having online. In online retail, VR solutions can be used to create more engaging and immersive shopping experiences that mimic the "hands-on" advantages of bricks ‘n’ mortar outlets. The retail industry is going through huge changes, both online and offline, and both offer plenty of opportunities to innovate with XR technologies. The suit currently costs around $20,000 and, among other uses, is used by NASA for astronaut training, but we can expect to see smaller-scale consumer versions on the market in 2022. One example is the Teslasuit that provides tactile feedback through electrostimulation. Other innovations will attempt to solve the problem of enabling realistic movement within virtual environments (which will always be a problem if your actual environment doesn’t match the size and proportions of your virtual one, and isn’t free of hazards that might cause you to trip over!) Proposed solutions to this problem include both boots, as offered by Ekto VR, and treadmills, like the one developed by Virtuix.Ī technology known as haptic feedback will attempt to solve the problem of providing sensations of touch in XR environments. A big advantage here is that the system only needs to render parts of the picture that are being directly viewed in high quality, reducing the power consumption of the headset. Eye-tracking technology that lets us control interfaces with eyeball movements has already been cracked, thanks to the HHTC Vive Pro Eye headset, and we can expect more software to take advantage of this technology in the coming year. 2022 should see the release of Meta’s Horizon platform, giving people their first taste of what the metaverse could become, and VR will be the window through which they experience it. And AR, too, with its potential to blur the distinction between virtual and real worlds, is another idea that meshes well with the metaverse concept. 3D environments, avatars, and gamification – three fundamental aspects of the concept – all fit well with VR interfaces. But Meta’s focus on the VR aspects (through its hardware brand Oculus) means that it’s likely to be a core feature. The truth is that no one exactly knows what the metaverse will look like if predictions that it will play a big part in our lives turn out to be correct. This is because more immersive, experiential environments are central to the whole concept – something that XR interfaces lend themselves to very well. ![]() Although the metaverse doesn’t have to exclusively exist in XR, it’s the version of it that does that’s getting the most attention. ![]() This is likely to remain the case throughout 2022. Sometimes called Web 3.0 (or social media 2.0), the metaverse is a concept that’s the focus of a lot of excitement right now - see Facebook’s recent rebrand to Meta.
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