Data and intelligence firm GrowthEnabler has just published the first UK focused AR and VR market report. Here are their top 10 recommendations for AR and VR companies, innovators and technologists:

1) Product Usability Drives Investment And Growth

AR and VR technology products that are ultra ‘cool’, visually stunning and beautifully designed, also need to have market appeal and should be easy-to-use. Investors favour products that have a blend of both ‘cool factor’ status and a strong usability score. AR and VR start-ups should build products using Lean six sigma techniques, creating a Minimum Viable Product that is continually user-tested and part of an iterative feedback process.

2) Product Innovation And R&D Is Essential

AR and VR technologies are an early stage of development vs established mainstream technologies. For innovators, there is a need for at least 60% of investment funds to be focused on R&D, product innovation, roadmap development and user-centric design to drive mass-market adoption. New technology advancements, coupled with the ever lowering cost of hardware, courtesy, Moore’s Law, should make this process easier to manage.

3) Master An Industry

AR and VR start-ups need to focus on designing and marketing products to address opportunities and challenges specific to an industry. In some cases, it makes sense to select a primary and secondary industry focus. Having core specialisation in an industry helps to establish brand expertise, competitive differentiation and both customer mind and market share.

4) Create Immersive And Interactive Products

User experience design that is mobile-ready creates immersive and interactive engagement drives brand value and product stickiness. PokémonGo applied these design principles to create a highly engaging and addictive experience that resulted in mass adoption and virality.

5) Build A Seamless & Personalised User Experience

Personalisation and cross-device usability through multi-platform development standards ensure users spend more time engaging with the product wherever or whenever across platforms. Understanding the flow of the end-to-end user journey and diverse user personas can be useful in user centric design and product development. For example, a user who adds items to a shopping cart in a VR e-commerce experience should be able to continue the same experience seamlessly on a smartphone or tablet, with the same level of personalisation.

6) Focusing On And Going Beyond The Gaming Industry

The gaming industry has cemented itself as the clear industry leader and early adopter of AR & VR technologies and products. AR and VR start-ups should build and design products to meet the growing demand of this fast growing sector. Besides gaming, it is important to diversify products and services and develop use cases that can help real estate, automotive, retail, automotive and healthcare segments.

7) Innovate And Incubate New Technologies Faster

Key industries such as gaming, retail, consumer goods, automotive, healthcare, real estate, and manufacturing should seize the opportunity as early adopters of AR and VR and be seen as brand innovators. The net value and return on investment in AR and VR trials can be significant if aligned with key business initiatives and priorities relating to customer satisfaction, experience, intimacy and speed-to-sales.

8) Identify Applications That Address Mission-Critical Business Use Cases For Greater Adoption

Corporate giants in the industry segments described above should identify specific customer service, sales enablement and product development use cases for AR and VR adoption. Key areas of end-user use case focus must include: customer demos, sales events, product trails, employee training and experiential shopping/learning.

9) Develop An Ecosystem Of Start-up Partners For Continuous Product, Operations And Customer Innovation

Corporate houses must chart out the path to current and future product, service or technology innovation by investing in development of start-up ecosystems. These ecosystems aid a continuous innovation cycle for product, service and technology (software, hardware and services) roadmap upgradation with the ultimate goal to increase speed to market and revenue growth.

10) Adopt Open Source AR And VR Platforms For High Usage, Adoption And Scalability

For AR and VR tools to reach their true potential in terms of usage, scalability and adoption, corporate end-users must force the innovators to develop open architecture applications so that multiple AR and VR applications can work across different operating systems. In order to work seamlessly, AR and VR applications also require multiple points of integration across systems, content types, data models and digital assets. Ultimately, open source and open architecture platforms support comprehensive systems integration enterprise-wide.

For more detail and insight from the AR&VR Market Pulse Report, please visit www.growthenabler.com