Over on the XR For Business Podcast, Alan, Julie, and VP of Marketing Alex Colgan dedicated our 150th broadcast episode to looking back over 2020, both in the grand scheme of everything (2020 was a red letter year for everyone), as well as how the XR sector weathered the storm.
As part of that look back, we invited all of our past guests to catch our listeners up with their work, by asking them all three questions:
What was your biggest success in 2020?
What was your biggest challenge in 2020?
Where do you see the XR industry going in 2021 and beyond?
The idea was to get a few responses back, and discuss the answers on the show. We assumed, our guests have all been captains of industry, and most will be too busy to respond in time, and we would have been happy with just three or four respondents.
But wow, were we surprised at the response! We reached our “three-or-four” goal in the first hour, ans nearly 20 of you fine folks responded in the first 24 hours alone. Never underestimate the enthusiasm of the XR sector!
Since we didn’t have the time to discuss every respondent in our audio episode, we thought we’d feature some of the ones that didn’t make it to air as a companion piece on the MetaVRse blog. We’ll be sharing more still on our social channels, in the days following the release of our 150th episode.
Cortney Harding: “What was your biggest success from this past year?”
Despite this year being awful for humanity, we worked on a lot of great projects and had our best year ever. We spent the top half of the year working with PWC on internal projects and also projects for Amazon and Target; we worked with a startup called Eunoe to create an amazing mental health and wellness VR app; and we started working on a project with Walmart that will release in spring 2021.
Jacob Loewenstein: “What was your biggest success from this past year?”
Launching Spatial publicly in the Oculus Quest store for free, which has translated to 130x growth in our daily active users, and bottoms up growth of Spatial being used for anything from the sharing of Covid research by Cornell Weil medical center to executive meeting at Pfizer to teaching classes at the University of Washington.
Walter Davis: “Where do you see the XR industry in 2021 and beyond?”
For 2021 I would like to see the industry focus more on backend capabilities and brining more maturity to integrations, data handling, design tools with features targeted at use cases for build and with data and relevant tracking in mind. The technology is at a great maturity level for spatial tracking, visualization, etc. Adoption for enterprise, I think, is going to continue to lack in comparison to 2D platforms until solutions shift to bring more focus on in-depth enterprise needs, and understanding sectors and applications of technology. Deeper levels of integrations and partnerships needed with key players in the enterprise space such as salesforce, workday, Microsoft, etc.
Nick Cherukuri: “What was your biggest challenge this past year?”
Covid definitely changed the operations of many companies, and we had to adapt in order to help supplement the needs of a remote workforce. At ThirdEye, we had to rapidly scale our remote eye software application to handle an increased need for remote work and the different features field service and healthcare industries needed.
Daniel Blair: “Where do you see the XR industry in 2021 and beyond?”
One of the interesting byproducts of this year I think is that more companies than ever are looking at VR/AR/XR technology for solving problems. This is amplified by the fact that people need to connect remotely and that more people have had time to sit and think about innovation in their organizations. This is just the beginning of this wave, and companies like ours are already feeling the increased workload coming from this.
This is still just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what we heard back from our past guests. We’ll try to make sure we share a little bit of everyone’s insights over the coming weeks – these kernels of perspective are too good to keep them all to ourselves.
