Augmented and Virtual Reality will indeed soon create a seismic shift in customer expectations, predict experts as far as customer experience is concerned
From Paleolithic cave paintings to the great works of Shakespeare to the new digital form, communication is indeed about conveying the human experience. Every word and image is rather meant to break down the boundaries between one’s minds, share emotions and information, and build a micro-relationship between the creator as well as their audience.
For this augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) as communication tools have indeed the potential to surpass the development of the written word, the invention of the printing press, and the commercialization of photography. Earlier, there has never been a method of communication that does combine an immersive experience with interactivity in a way that so closely mimics and also augments the human experience. For brands and their CX efforts, the coming impact of AR and VR cannot indeed be overstated.

AR and VR 101

While AR and VR have indeed been popular concepts in science fiction for many decades, they have rather finally reached the technical maturity that is necessary to go from high-tech toy to a valid communication medium.
Augmented reality does refer to the overlay of a digital element on a real-world environment, usually through the use of a screen such as a phone or a tablet. For example, furniture shoppers can make use of the IKEA Place mobile app to point their smartphone at a space in their home to see what a couch, chair, table or any other piece of IKEA furniture will indeed look like in that space.

Virtual reality does refer to the creation as well as delivery of an immersive digital experience that does block out reality through the use of headsets, goggles, monitors, or simulators. VR has indeed been primarily made use for video games, movies, as well as entertainment; though another common use is for training professionals such as surgeons, soldiers, and pilots.

One can appreciate its link to broadband availability and higher speed connections with future 5G technologies, the increased processing power of devices, and also the maturity of technology such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence, AR and VR are poised to become a primary way for brands in order to interact and communicate with consumers. In fact, software, development kits, and app stores to make AR and VR as easy to adopt as smartphones were a decade earlier.

The shift to VR and AR in CX

When it does come to customer experience, experts do indeed predict that AR and VR will rather soon create a seismic shift in customer expectations on par or exceeding the impact of social media, mobile apps, as well as the internet itself, had on how brands do approach CX. As brands do work to incorporate VR and AR into their overall digital strategy, it will indeed be a key to keep the human experience front and center. That does mean focusing on delivering:

With AR and VR, one can completely immerse aone’s audience in one’s brand from the comfort of their own home, while making use of data to make that experience unique to them. By meeting one’s customers where they are, both literally as well as figuratively, the easier it will be for the user to be able to see how one’s brand fits into their lifestyle.

Emotional resonance:

VR and AR do have the power to elicit an emotional response, which a brochure or webpage cannot hope to match. These technologies do allow customers to interact with one’s brand as an active participant instead of as a passive consumer, much-giving brands the opportunity to create memorable experiences at every touch point.

Accessible information:

As self-service does become more common, AR and VR will indeed be critical in bridging the gap between the brand as well as the customer. These technologies can indeed give users confidence that they are making the right buying decision at their own pace while having access to one’s complete CX team at the touch of a virtual button.

Customer engagement:

As customers do gain the ability to explore products with a 360º view, from inside out, and in 3D, brands are indeed going to be able to engage with customers at an almost unimaginable level using real-time data.

As technology such as artificial intelligence does come to the forefront, VR and AR may also help overcome the CX divide that can come from “dealing with a robot” versus working with a human. For example, while sophisticated AI can indeed look at a bank customer’s spending patterns in order to make recommendations for meeting a savings goal like retirement, the advice the AI does provide and can be easy to ignore if it were to come via email or a text. However, in case it is delivered by the bank’s brand avatar as a part of a VR experience, it would rather make it easier for the customer to be able to create an emotional connection and be open to what the AI has to communicate, just as if it were coming from a human advisor. Beyond just selling more product, VR and AR can also be used by companies to create digital life coaches that do help solve real-world problems and build lasting brand value.

While AR smart-phone apps and VR headsets are indeed already common today, the virtual revolution is only beginning. Every business in every industry has no doubt the opportunity to incorporate AR and VR throughout their entire CX process, from marketing to sales to customer support. The successful company will be the one that does make use of this technology, not as a new channel for engagement with the company, but as a way to transform what engagement truly means.

How will virtual reality change the healthcare industry?

The place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world is what it is all about.

Virtual Reality has indeed already changed the healthcare industry. Moreover, healthcare is one of the “hottest” industries, where Virtual Reality is rapidly hitting a place for itself.
Relief of the sensation of pain

Here one’s doctor does prescribe to pick up the app, where one can hide in the huts, which are made of snow or other materials. The environment does place the patients in a condition where one, simply gets pleasure from sightseeing. This does effectively help to calm down and distract the patients from quite unpleasant burning sensation throughout one’s body. Currently, special healthcare applications are being developed, and are being widely made use of to distract from painful procedures effectively, owing to which, it is possible to do without the anesthesia.

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One of such healthcare applications is no doubt a video game SnowWorld, from the University of Washington. Despite the fact that all this is of course in the process of the development stage, the numerous clinical results do indicate very encouraging results.

Virtual reality and exposure therapy

Virtual reality exposure therapy is made use of, particularly with the soldiers, who survived post-traumatic stress syndrome, caused by hostilities. The essence of the therapy doe lies in patient’s immersion in simulation, where he then drives the Hammer and suddenly a homemade device tends to explode in a certain place.

This is indeed a special opportunity for the soldiers to say, especially for those, who survived the war, how it was and how it was indeed awful. This is a peculiar stimulation of the imagination, where the patient is rather trying to work over the trauma or any other problems by a specific provocative method.

Virtual Reality as a tool to conquer phobias

The above-mentioned exposure therapy is indeed very useful for the standard treatment for phobias.

The patient, under the supervision of a psychologist, does meet something that does cause fear. For example, a man has a fear of public speaking. Virtual realities technologies do help cope with them by “acting” in front of a virtual audience.

Frequently observed spider phobia is also worth paying attention to. One of the first prominent healthcare applications, in order to treat spider phobia, is Spider World.

Virtual Robotic Surgery

Robotic surgery has indeed become popular virtual technology. The semantics of the term does seem to be a bit intricate, but still. The process of fulfilling the operation is the following: A robotic device does perform the operation but is controlled by a human surgeon. It is a plain, sublime interaction, which does decrease time, and also reduces the risk of complications.

Virtual reality has also, in fact, found its application in educational purposes and in the area of Remote Telesurgery, where the operation is carried out in separate place for the patient. The main idea of this specific system is indeed revealed in force feedback, where a surgeon can evaluate the amount of pressure to use when performing delicate action procedures.

An increasingly connected world does celebrate Wi-Fi Day, being mindful that it is Li-Fi that is making the waves.

Light fidelity, which does use light waves instead of radio waves to provide an internet connection, is promising to make significant inroads by reducing network congestion around the globe, which includes India.

For example, Wipro Lighting, a unit of Wipro’s consumer care business, has indeed begun offering this technology to Indian customers in partnership with PureLifi Scotland. One is offering LiFi (data through light) solutions for significantly greater security as well as safety and ultra-fast data transmission rates to deliver unprecedented low latency and reliability. This is to complement and also enhance existing cellular and wi-fi networks.

In August 2018, PureLiFi did deploy its Li-Fi solutions at Kyle Academy secondary school in Ayr, Scotland. The project was conducted in collaboration with Edinburgh University and is indeed being overseen by the Scottish Futures Trust, which does support the Scottish government’s digital strategy. PureLiFi and the LiFi Research and Development Centre at Edinburgh University does provide the resources for the execution of the pilot with hands-on support and subsequent testing.

The installation of PureLiFi’s LiFi-XC system does comprise of eight LiFi-enabled LED light bulbs in the ceiling. Students were rather given access to LiFi-XC stations that do plug into their laptops enabling high-speed connectivity through the lights. Kyle Academy was the first school globally to pilot the technology in one’s classroom.

This June, at the International Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, Air France, Latecoere and Ubisoft did showcase their Li-Fi technology making use of light to transmit data and ran an in-flight video game tournament showcasing this technology.

On 19 June, Signify announced that the launch of a new range of Li-Fi systems that do include the world’s fastest and most reliable Li-Fi systems commercially available. The range, branded Trulifi, leverages existing and future professional luminaries. Instead of using radio signals (such as Wi-Fi, 4G/5G, Bluetooth, etc.), Trulifi does make use of light waves to enable highly reliable, secure two-way wireless communications at speeds which are far above most conventional workplace wireless technologies.

The term Li-Fi was rather coined by Prof. Harald Haas, founder and chief scientist of pureLiFi, and also a professor of mobile communications at Edinburgh University. Li-Fi is a category of Optical Wireless Communications (OWC), which does include infrared and ultra-violet communications as well as visible light. However, Li-Fi is unique in that the same light energy used for illumination may also be used for communication.

Life does comprise multiple light bulbs to form a wireless network. When an electrical current is rather applied to an LED light bulb, a stream of light (photons) is emitted from the bulb. As explained on the Purple-Fi website, LED bulbs are of course semi-conductor devices, implying that the brightness of the light flowing through them can be changed at extremely high speeds. This does indeed allow one to send a signal by modulating the light at different rates. The signal can then be received by a detector which does interpret the changes in light intensity (the signal) as data. The intensity modulation cannot indeed be seen by the human eye, and thus communication is just as seamless as other radio systems, thus allowing the users to be connected where there is Li-Fi enabled light. Making use of this technique, data can be transmitted from an LED light bulb at high speeds.

Signify’s Trulifi, for example, makes use of optical wireless transceiver technology built, or retrofitted, into Philips Luminaires, which does mean customers do not have to rip and replace their existing lighting infrastructure. The new range, according to a company statement, does provide wireless connectivity at speeds up to 150 megabits per second (Mbps) over large spaces such as meeting rooms as well as office floors and does allow for a seamless handover between each Trulifi-enabled luminaire. The speed is fast enough to stream simultaneously 30 1080p HDTV movies. A USB-access key plugged into a laptop, which is required to receive the LiFi signal and also acts as an emitter to send data back to the luminaire.

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There are indeed compelling reasons to use Li-Fi in conjunction with Wi-Fi. For one, with the increasing number of internet-connected devices in classrooms, installing Li-Fi alongside Wi-Fi can rather provide additional bandwidth to reduce network congestion, thus enabling students to stream educational videos and download resources with seamless connectivity. Second, Li-Fi has the capability to support big data, as well as technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Also, while there is 300 gigahertz of the radio spectrum, there is 300 terahertz of visible light spectrum. If one adds infrared spectrum to the visible light spectrum, it will be 2,600 times larger than the entire radio spectrum, Haas said at Mint’s flagship technology conference in 2017, thus adding that this spectrum is free.

Christie Arokiaraj, 23, happens to be a welder who does happen to work from a small store outside the teeming Krishnarajapuram Railway Station on Bengaluru’s eastern periphery. For nine to 10 hours a day, his gaunt frame is indeed crouched over pieces of metal to meet a steady stream of orders from small businesses as well as homeowners in the vicinity.

His life does spark up after 9 pm when Arokiaraj indeed gets together with four or five friends and then unwinds on platform 4 of the station.

Making use of the free WiFi on offer, the youth use their smartphones to surf the web and check out videos on YouTube, Facebook as well as WhatsApp, between chat sessions. The latest forwards are exchanged and jokes are indeed sniggered.

However, over the past three to four months, another app has indeed caught their fancy: TikTok, the short-video sharing app that is owned by Bytedance, the world’s most valuable startup that was indeed valued at $75 billion in late 2018. For 20-30 minutes daily, Arokiaraj and his friends watch slapstick comedy, cheer strangers mimicking Tamil as well as Bollywood movie stars and ogle at women dancing to slow music from far away Madhya Pradesh and Mumbai — all on the given app.

In the last 12 months that TikTok has been rather operational in India — including six months when it did survive a ban — the upstart has indeed rapidly racked up some 200 million users as of June, according to its data. The app has been downloaded over a billion times across the world. One is enabling people from every corner of the country with a global platform that does give them the unlimited opportunity to capture and share their creativity.

TikTok happens to be a popular pan-India because one does recognize that creativity is not just limited to the audience belonging to certain towns or users who happen to be speaking a particular language.

The gaiety of the group on platform 4 shows Sharma is indeed on the mark. Arokiaraj says TikTok has become the new must-have app among his peer group. Videos on the online platform do dominate late-night conversations, held between loud train whistles.

But not everyone is thrilled by TikTok’s explosive growth. The app’s detractor’s said it was built in China in a walled garden — with virtually no threat from foreign rivals — funded by local investors and first launched in a familiar market.

This, say, observers, has led to growing disquiet in the market, which has been rather cleaved into two — homespun entrepreneurs worrying about being muscled out by foreign investors as well as multinationals who do claim success is determined by market forces and not financial heft. It has also forced entrepreneurs to take hard decisions. Craftsvilla, for instance, had to rapidly shrink its operations over the past 12 months.

Technology has advanced much and has proved very useful in one’s daily life activities.

Olivier Klein says when one talks about technologies, it is not indeed a specific list, it is about technologies that do help redefine customer experiences or just improve overall operational efficiency. A big chunk of customer experience goes into data analytics – artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) space. This in turn, is made use of in, for example, understanding voice or speech better. Thus, it is about developing more personalized customer experience and better models around how one can create better customer experiences on online platforms.

Then there is the element of actually being more operationally efficient. We do provide customers with algorithms and data sets to run operations more efficiently. For example, in India, one works work with RedBus, which does make use of services such as Amazon Sagemaker to build ML models on reviews and recommendations.

A lot of enterprises are looking into AWS to understand what are the services as well as capabilities that do allow them to move faster and also reduce their costs to operate ML.

In the case of Intuit, it received a 90 percent reduction at the time of deployment. This allows it to move a lot faster, but also time equals cost, thus, this is more cost effective.

YS: Has one noticed any trends in terms of organizations of particular sectors adopting AWS faster?

OK: Neither geographies nor industry verticals tend to define the maturity or willingness of a company to try things out. Cloud Computing has no doubts about the benefit that one has tremendous flexibility of experimentation. The level of experimenting has rather increased because of cloud computing.

YS: What challenges are enterprises facing due to rapid change and development of technologies?

OK: For us, it is always about choice and flexibility. We do give customers the flexibility to migrate from their current services to AWS as they can use the migration service. Also, in that migration process, one optimizes their platform.

For example, many of our customers have indeed asked us if we can help them with their database strategies. One does provide them choices to choose the right kind of underlying technology. One also provides them with flexibility. The key point is one informs them that they can go all into AWS by completely restructuring their respective platforms and optimizing it to a cloud-native architecture.

A lot of startups on our website to optimize for the best kind of services as well as architecture under AWS. One tends to handhold them when it comes to migration.

With traditional companies, one sees that there is a certain amount of legacy and they have these pieces of software sitting around that slowly need to be shifted. One does offer the flexibility of “lift and shift” there.

The National Australian Bank would indeed be an example that is currently on a migration process into AWS.

YS: What kind of cloud are large enterprises using today – hybrid/ public or private?

OK: One personally does believe that these terminologies do not describe how customers run in an AWS environment. If one looks at the capabilities that one provides them – any kind of development at AWS actually requires a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). One’s customers can indeed run in a completely private isolated network environment that if they do set it up in a certain manner, can completely be disconnected from the internet.

Customers can rather pick and choose what kind of workload they want to run in which environment. One also has devices such as AWS Snowball that do allow movement of large amounts of data by having an appliance which is shipped to the customer, loaded with data and moved to a cloud environment. It can be used back and forth.

YS: Whenever one does talk about the movement of data and migration, there is always a concern about security. How is technology ensuring that an individual’s identity is protected?

OK: One is always vigilant about our customers’ data and one does not actually access our customers’ data at any point in time. But it is also about giving our customers the right kind of tools as well as services to see that they can define their security footprint that they are compliant with.

More concretely, at any given point of time at AWS, with the click of a button, a customer can indeed have his data fully encrypted. Any change in the AWS environment, can not only be traced but also be immediately accessed against the set of rules that a customer defines.

One gives customers the full flexibility to define their own requirements on how they want to set up their platform, thus making sure that changes are always traced and is also audited at any given point of time. One service called Amazon Macie, if indeed activated against a storage bucket, does look at the personally identifiable information in the buckets as well as immediately sends notifications that do trigger immediate masking of that data. Most importantly, it is using ML learning models to understand the access partners against that data.