Reprinted by kind by permission of the author, Can Tatli
Research dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MSc Global Brand Management
Griffith College Dublin
Dissertation Supervisor: Carla De Tona
Student Name: Can Tatli
26.08.2019.
Abstract
In this paper the concept explored was whether Irish VR/AR businesses should feel confident about the growth of their sector predicted by various companies and asks whether changes should be
made to their business practices in order to improve their financial positions as the sector continues
to grow. The question is explored using concepts and theories developed by two thinkers who have recently published books on the subject following a lifetime of working with the technology,
namely Lanier and Bailenson. This data is supported by information from academic journals. The process of collecting original data for this paper was through a series of interviews with professionals in management positions currently working in the industry in Ireland with backgrounds in information technology.
The results indicate that market prediction information published by large private companies who don’t acknowledge how they arrive at their data isn’t considered accurate by four of the six people interviewed. This confirms more about who the data is presented for rather than its accuracy. The participants are right to suggest that the people who would benefit from a sharp rise in the market would be the multinational companies who have VR, AR and XR subdivisions. The smaller
companies who I researched can utilize this projected rise in the market value by continuing to build a well integrated professional community. As the market is built on a foundation of altruistic principles outlined by Lanier, suggestions are made to use the growing industry to help people in need, which has the potential to strengthen their brands.
Introduction
1.1 Overview
During 1933, a science fiction story called “The Man Who Awoke” by Laurence Manning was serialised in an american magazine. It describes a future when people voluntarily seek a self curated virtual life made possible by sense replacement technology. This desire to use computers to create a new reality, often as an escape from a less than perfect future became a very popular theme in science fiction with many variations. Throughout the 20th century, the prospect of real life immersive technologies inspired hope and concern for a future where believable environments, inhabitable by humans, can be made possible by technology. This concept of using technology to create alternate realities evolved through many changes until it became a worldwide industry.
Over the following 90 years, this dream had evolved into a business sector, then in
March 2014, the corporate giant Facebook acquired a small tech company called Oculus
VR for $2 billion. Since then, games like Resident Evil 7 in 2017 and Beat Saber in 2018 became peer reviewed and sold well, triggering a continuously growing interest in the industry as it enjoyed a significant renaissance.
The industries that have grown up around Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have clearly become established as a worldwide market. This human obsession with inhabiting a curated world has many different approaches and uses, making it notoriously hard to define. Recently the even broader, inclusive, and flexible term, XR, meaning Cross Reality became popular which for the purposes of this paper will mean Mixed Reality. When discussing the contemporary industry as a whole, it is appropriate to use the term VR/AR/XR, as this acknowledges the importance of each aspect of a continuously expanding industry.
1.2 Research Purpose
The VR/AR/XR sector has become established as an emerging marketplace in Ireland, making it a recognised hub for immersive technologies in Europe. Following Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union, Ireland’s VR/AR sector increased as Ireland had the potential of being the only country with full access to the EU single market where English is the primary language. There is also a lot of potential for UK researchers to consider moving to Ireland following Brexit due to access to EU research programmes (Mewawalla, 2019, 3). In light of the potential political and social problems that will be caused by Brexit for Irish people, the growth of the VR/AR/XR industry Ireland could potentially be an advantageous outcome.
I have become very interested in the brands that have become a part of the Irish VR/AR/XR sector because they work in an industry that could have a profound influence on the future of humanity. I’m interested in how a technology that has such a cult following is part of a growing sector in a small country, so my online research very quickly resulted in the discovery of massive predicted figures for the growth of the industry over the next 5 years.
This was a great opportunity to read about this technology and how it markets itself, so I planned a piece of research that would allow me to interact with these businesses while simultaneously creating research that would be useful to people in the sector.
1.3 Research Objective
This research is exploratory in nature, aiming to provide a platform for marketers, brand managers, and anyone with an interest in VR in general, to understand how the VR/AR/XR industry in Ireland functioned during this time of massive growth. Until the late 90s the industry had been featured heavily in popular culture but had experienced a decline due to the technology not being at the level required to make believable VR experiences. During the extended programme of research that was conducted prior to the writing of this paper, there was a noticeable gap in the literature regarding Irish companies, so I wanted to settle on a subject that would be of interest to them and would allow me to build a good insight into the industry. The predicted figures for the growth of the industry seemed so abnormally huge that I found them hard to believe. Through chance encounters with people who have an interest in the subject I became interested in how conspiratorial people sounded when they discussed stock market predictions and prediction markets, so I started to plan a paper that was an intersection of these two cultural phenomena. I wanted to discuss altruism in the VR market as I have recently been interested in the motivations of companies who use charity work and the reduction of suffering as a big part of their business, which is significant in the development of the VR industry. Thus, guiding the research is the question of my thesis, giving multiple opportunities to explore the rare position these companies are experiencing, where the industry predictions for Ireland are for unfathomable industrial growth while large multinational corporations are choosing Ireland as a European base. By exploring the following themes I will develop a strong case for my answer that will be incredibly useful for opening up new avenues for research now and for the future.
1.4 Structure of the Study
The research consists of a critical literature review of research. This guided study, beginning with books and progressing on to academic journals relating to the various fields mentioned allowed me to identify a number of gaps in literature. The conceptual framework followed, which assisted in the selection of new texts that could develop the ideas and discussions that are touched upon in this paper. The next task was creating a methodology of research conducted in the writing of this article, which consisted of the continuation of the extensive research into the various fields I had selected as relevant, and the writing and carrying out of interviews with those working within the
VR/AR/XR industry. These were transcribed and inserted into online documents so that I could search for terms using the find tool while writing the presentation and analysis of findings from the research. Observations made by the previously mentioned interviewees are discussed in detail. The presentation of findings has been broken into themed sections that discuss the core concepts that have come out of the data collection process undertaken for this research. Finally there is a conclusion chapter containing observations on the implications of the findings for the research questions, a discussion of contributions and limitations of the research, recommendations for people making research that follows on from this work in the future, followed by my final conclusion and reflections on the research I have undertaken. I hope that the research will give any marketers working in the tech sector and those with an interest in branding practice, to plan further research into the Irish VR/AR/XR sector.
Literature Review
2.1 Overview
The VR/AR/XR industry has only recently attracted significant financial investment due to developments in software and hardware. It has recently become an established sector in Ireland.
This research was conducted through extensive reading, which built up an understanding of every aspect of the VR/AR/XR industry in general, allowing me to recognise the fields of research that needed to be further examined. I subsequently narrowed my research down to the current state of the industry in Ireland. Although the literature that I have analysed covers a wide variety of topics relating to VR/AR/XR, this review will focus on four major themes which are the focal point of this research. These themes are: ‘The Development of the Industry’, ‘The VR/AR Renaissance’, ‘Presence and Immersion’ and ‘Market Analysis’.
Of utmost importance was obtaining an understanding concerning which avenues had not yet been explored, and whether current thinking had addressed these focus topics in tandem with each other. This ensured that there was no duplication of research that already addressed these topics in relation to each other. Throughout this research, I realised that no peer reviewed articles had already addressed the issues discussed in this paper, confirming that exploratory research concerning these topics were needed and worthwhile.
2.2 History of the VR/AR industry
This research will broaden my understanding of the Virtual Reality (VR) industry. It developed from a concept in science fiction in the early 20th century to a real technology in the late 20th century. This interest was initially inspired by Jaron Lanier’s “Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality” (2018), which gave me an insight not only into the science behind the human obsession with inhabiting a curated world but how this had deep political implications. Lanier says “(v)irtual reality peels away phenomena and reveals that consciousness remains and is real. Virtual reality is the technology that exposes you to yourself” (Lanier, 2017 p.110). Through affectionately describing a technology that gives sensory feedback in order to convince the user they are inhabiting another world Lanier explains the capabilities this technology has for the future of humanity. Lanier is a technological futurist and founder of VPL, an early VR company and the text is written from his first person perspective, giving it the appearance of being theoretically authentic. The tone is generally positive and pro VR, which fits the commitment to what he claims was broadly accepted as the ideology of VR in the 1980s, a unanimously utopian technological playground. The text frequently juxtaposes this with warnings of how VR is “like all the media before it: capable of amplifying both the best and worst in people” (Lanier, 2017 p.282).
He describes the world of Silicone Valley as a power struggle that he compares to Norbert Wiener’s “The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society” (1954), which explains a lot about how automation could result in the dehumanization or subordination of humans. He discusses this foundational text, which warns that if humans didn’t continue to apply proper supervision, machines could escape their control. Lanier explains how the term coined by Wiener, cybernetics “proposed only that computers and people would have to be understood in the context of each other. It wasn’t concerned with metaphysics.” (Lanier, 2017 p.114-115)
Through reading Jeremy Bailenson’s “Experience On Demand” (2019), I deepened this understanding of human interaction with technology. Bailenson’s book was published in 2018, four years after 25 March 2014, when Oculus VR, the company behind the first mass-marketed VR helmet, suitable for home entertainment was acquired by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for 2.3 billion American Dollars in cash and stock providing the springboard for many of Bailenson’s observations about how business intersects with technological experimentation in the VR market, exposing how market transactions always represent vital incidents in the development of VR as financial backing is always vital to progress the technology.
His own first-hand experience is made more reliable by his role as a professor at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which explores the dynamics and implications of participants in immersive VR simulations, communication systems, and games. His involvement with the industry could negatively impact his reliability as a narrator, for example in saying that “VR is far more psychologically powerful than any medium ever invented and is poised to dramatically transform our lives” (Bailenson, 2019 p.15). As he is someone who financially benefits from the success of the industry, it could be posited that this financial investment in the VR industry makes him less believable. However, he frequently discusses potential problems with the medium, for example the warnings he accounts giving to Zuckerberg about how social problems can already be caused by addiction to pornography and videogames and how this can be amplified in a medium this immersive. He also discusses “the more mundane, but no less threatening, danger of millions of people banging into walls and coffee tables while blinded by headsets projecting compelling visions into their eyes.”(Bailenson, 2019 p.14) This, along with his tendency to expose how programming and software development could potentially strengthen egalitarian power structures demonstrates that although his account of VR is biased towards the positive through belief in the technology and his involvement in the industry, it is balanced and unafraid of highlighting the social risks of immersive technology.
Bailenson is just as immersed in the business world as Lanier but a lot less critical of it. His connections to the academic world increase his reliability, although his accounts of the successes and pitfalls of VR are more centrist in tone, possibly to ensure the book would reach a wider audience. However this is not a populist account that merely highlights elements of the medium and its industry’s potential personal benefits to consumers, as Bailenson frequently reminds us that the social benefits of this technology should not be taken for granted. For example, in saying that “media experiences are like your diet: you are what you eat” (Bailenson, 2019 p.89) Bailenson balances the responsibility of reforming or reducing the dangers of the industry in the hands of the consumer rather than on powerful management figures with investments in the VR industry.
His and Lanier’s commitment to using VR to improve lives altruistically as a means to improve healthcare and tackle climate change demonstrate that his measured responses are the result of carefully curated professionalism as opposed to a desire to inflate his own importance. This altruistic element makes an impression on early adopters to VR, as the technology is capable of creating empathy through immersive experiences. Scientists who have worked with the technology throughout its existence have followed in the footsteps of pathfinders like Lanier, developing an industry that has the potential to change humanity for the better.
It is important to mention that the VR sector has been influenced by popular culture (and vice-versa) and has an escapist allure for the entertainment industry, which means that researching the more popular side of the market through non academic texts is essential from a marketing perspective because this escapism is implicit in the identity of VR. There are other contemporary non academic texts such as Blake J. Harris’ “The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality”(2019) that challenge both Lanier and Bailenson’s beliefs. This book tells the story of how big companies have utilised virtual reality for capitalistic means, from the perspective of an industry insider who is unashamedly a pro free market capitalist. Harris cites Donald Trump’s "The Art of the Deal" as inspiration, demonstrating his conservative political persuasion (Harris, 2019 p.43). Citing a notoriously ghostwritten text that has been widely criticised (Mayer, 2016) demonstrates that Harris’ opinions about VR could be less viable. In addition, Harris doesn’t offer any criticism on the concept of VR, demonstrating that this text is less valid as a source than those by Lanier or Bailenson.
Harris, along with inventor Palmer Luckey is the co founder of Oculus, the VR company that was bought by Facebook, and their story is told by Harris from an “underdog” perspective. Therefore this could be seen as a less reliable source as the intention of telling the story appears to be redemption of the author from the bad publicity that resulted after the purchase. It doesn’t criticise Luckey’s post Oculus job in the drone technology market for the military, which demonstrates a lack of social awareness and suggests the author’s intention is to improve public relations for his Oculus colleagues (Harris, 2019 p.412). This bias distracts from the responsibility that both Lanier and Bailenson recommend; that market leaders ensure VR/AR is used for the benefit of humanity rather than privileged individuals in the business. This source is therefore less reliable in representing the power embedded in this industry for political and social change.
In order to approach both Lanier and Bailenson critically, my study progressed to researching academic journals about VR. This more extensive knowledge base allowed me to interrogate Lanier and Bailenson in order to establish whether their insights are based on a sound theoretical basis, and thus establish them as reputable sources.
This research into commodification was deepened through discovering two archived online articles, namely Mims’ “Whatever Happened to ... Virtual Reality?” (2010) and a NASA article from 2004 with exactly the same title, exposing the fact that less money was being invested in consumer-level VR due to the technology not being sufficiently advanced. These articles demonstrate how media interest was waning while behind the scenes the industry continued developing new technology, with the aim of resolving the issues of nausea and fatigue that had made VR appear less commercially viable, while simultaneously developing Augmented Reality (AR) solutions in laboratories (NASA, 2004). These internet articles were only useful as insights into the struggles the industry was going through in that era of its development. Although Haenlein and Kaplan’s “Flagship Brand Stores within Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Virtual Store Exposure on Real-Life Attitude toward the Brand and Purchase Intent” (2009) exposes the potential for brand management in virtual worlds, it also demonstrates how the limitations of the technology had switched the focus of consumers from the potential for life changing experiences in immersive worlds to the less challenging prospect of playing games like Second Life on a normal computer setup. (Haenlein & Kaplan, 2009)
Lanier discusses how he left his company VPL in 1992 (Lanier, 2017 p.518-541) and Bailenson switches his narrative away from consumer focused projects to work in the medical sector. Discussing a pain reduction simulator that was tested in clinical trials throughout this time, he suggests that although attempts to commodify VR experiences for private use had been scaled back, there was still funding for creating immersive experiences to ease suffering throughout the 1990s using a programme called
“SnowWorld” in research designed to study pain-relief effectiveness. ‘This was the first evidence to show that VR actually changes brain activity during painful procedures.’ (Bailenson, 2019 p.302)
At this time in the history of the industry the concept of retaining loyalty and altruistic intent against drawing in new business was clearly becoming relevant. This is a core theme in my research, a line of enquiry I pursued in the subsequent interviews. The tension between retaining a market in game development and losing that market due to the technology not being ready encouraged scientists to explore new avenues. It became apparent that focusing on the use of VR in medical sectors or training might be more sustainable than game development by intersecting with different market sectors, like healthcare and marketing/targeted advertising areas.
2.3 The VR/AR renaissance
A starting point as to why this research is important now is that VR can be classified as a communication medium as opposed to just a technology. In ‘Towards a Model for a Virtual Reality Experience: The Virtual Subjectiveness’, Pares and Parés (2006) wrote their paper from the perspective of reframing the way VR projects are classified, focusing on the technology’s ability to “convey meaning, to transfer knowledge and to generate experience” (Pares and Parés, 2006 p.235). This foundational text proposes unique meanings for terms that had already become established in the field to enhance comprehension and concept clarification in the scientific community.
This paper focuses exclusively on VR and there is no mention of Augmented Reality. It is useful to highlight at this point that Augmented Reality hadn’t been discussed as much as VR, mainly because there was little crossover between the two technologies at this time.
Kangdon Lee’s paper “Augmented Reality in Education and Training” (2012) reliably traces the history of this discipline using a literature review research method, reviewing the education and training outcomes of AR until that point and considering the potential future impact of the technology. As Facebook’s purchase of Oculus occurred in 2014, it is clear that the era of renaissance (an industry growth considered to begin from 2012-2014) corresponds with AR technology becoming more apparent in the literature.
The term Augmented Reality is best defined by both Lee and Grier et al as “a live direct or an indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound, graphics or GPS data.” (Lee,13;Grier et al, 2012 1351)
"XR" is another term, which is a far-reaching, inclusive, and flexible, initially defined by Joseph A. Paradiso and James A. Landay in “Cross-Reality Environments” (Paradiso & Landay, 2009) as ‘ the union between ubiquitous sensor/actuator networks and shared online virtual worlds-a place where collective human perception meets the machines' view of pervasive computing’. It is a term that is used widely in the industry but not unanimously, as demonstrated in the interviews in my research. From now on I will refer to VR or AR when talking specifically about these disciplines and XR only when explicitly discussing projects that fit Paradiso and Landay’s term.
It becomes evident that by 2014 VR had once again become a viable market. Slater and Sanchez-Vives (2016) discuss the industry as it was genuinely making a return due to advances in technology and new uses for AR and VR across a number of industries. This paper was funded by Oculus VR, LLC, a Facebook Company, so due to being uncritical it can’t be used as an unbiased piece of academia. However, it is evidence for the renewed positivity surrounding the international VR industry, simultaneously providing a good overview of the industry from a market leader. This paper can be referenced in this research as an accurate description of current and future VR and AR
applications.
Currently, VR and AR companies are taking advantage of the growth of this industry, expanding into new areas in order to take advantage of tangible use cases by any company regardless of their sector. Many companies I have talked to in Ireland are working for training, healthcare and marketing, but as the market continues to grow, more avenues will open up where VR and AR can be utilised.
2.4 Presence and Immersion
In order to discuss VR and AR technology it is important to research how it can create the illusion of a lived experience. This will increase understanding of ways in which VR/AR can influence humans and human behavior. Some applications of this are supplying training for first responders following natural disasters (Bailenson, 2019
p.121-122), giving surgeons opportunities to practice procedures before performing complex surgery on a real life patient and helping sufferers of PTSD with programs to assist them in healing from trauma (Lanier, 2017 p.260). This expands upon the creation of distraction techniques enabled by VR to move chronic sufferers’ attention away from pain, or simply allowing people to "be" someone or something else in order to increase empathy. Both Lanier and Bailenson offer explanations of how VR can influence empathy, a concept expanded upon by Donghee Shin in “Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: To what extent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?” (2018). This paper shows how effective technology can be in creating emotional links with participants. Shin expands upon existing texts such as Lombard and Ditton’s “At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence” (1997) to create new research into the way people empathise with and subsequently embody VR content. This gives me a framework that I can comprehend the emotional connections to the content they engage with. The research was conducted with 200 participants who were divided into two groups, people who had scored highly on an empathy test and people who had scored low, which were divided into two further groups to be shown content with high and low immersiveness respectively. The tests and their results demonstrate conclusively that “VR stories are reprocessed using user sense-making processes. Users actively create their own VR, based on their understanding of the story, their empathic traits, and the nature of the medium. In other words, VR developers propose immersion but users process it, based on their own preferences and needs.” (Shin, 2018 p.69). This assisted me in understanding the concept of immersion, allowing me to contemplate how VR/AR/XR can be used to manipulate the responsiveness of consumers.
The results should prove valuable for market researchers engaged in VR and storytelling, as they face the challenge of developing improved immersion and empathy indicators on which to base numerous user-based interaction and interface design decisions. The key to developing great VR stories is the medium's adoption by consumers, something that may be difficult to achieve. (Shin,2018 p.65)
Since its initial conceptualization, presence has been defined as a technology user's awareness of another person in a mediated environment. Since the emergence of VR, the concept has been understood as a feeling of being connected to other social users. Presence can be viewed as a state of mind, whereas immersion is an experience over time. (Shin, 2018 p.67)
Immersiveness is what gives VR the potential to influence users, so I have been interested in how VR can potentially be used as propaganda since beginning my research. Vital to this understanding is Bailenson’s discussion of the “mirror technique”, leading to what neuroscientists call “body transfer” (Bailenson, 2019 p.162-164)
Much has been written about ways to define how users engage with Virtual-Reality,
Augmented-Reality, and Mixed-Reality experiences. Grier et al. (2012) define Augmented Reality as “a live direct or an indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound, graphics or GPS data” (Grier, 2012 1351). I have used this as the definition of Augmented Reality (AR) throughout this thesis, as the paper was written for a conference discussing what research was required to define standards based on human factors relating to the use of AR and VR as a training solution.
The VR renaissance in 2014 allowed the industry more funding and freedom, so this institutionalisation naturally triggered research intending to clarify previous research. In response to Pares and Parés’ paper, Flavián, Ibáñez-Sánchez and Orús (2019) created a tool to assist academics and managers in the classification of VR/AR technologies called the EPI (Embodiment- Presence- Interactivity) Cube . This system of categorising existing technologies also allows future technological developments to be classified in a standardised way. (Flavián, Ibáñez-Sánchez and Orús, 2019)
2.5 Markets And Predictions
In order to understand the business structures related to the XR sector, I researched the predicted growth of the market. These figures are published online by private companies such as Business Wire, Grand View Research, ResearchandMarkets.com and Statista.com, all companies who sell market research reports. A check of the data available in December 2018 showed that Business Wire estimated that AR would be worth $60 billion by 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.29% and that VR would be worth 34 billion by 2023 growing at a CAGR of 33.95%. Grand View Research predicted the worth of the AR market to be worth $100 billion by 2024. Although this is on the lower end of the predictions, Research and Markets predicted that the VR/AR market will generate revenues of $55 billion by 2021. Statista.com predicted that by 2022 the VR/AR industry will reach the value of $209 billion.
I needed to find out whether these sources represented empirical evidence, so I researched to what extent predicted market growth figures are opinion based. Seeing as these companies don’t reveal their methods and the stock market is non-linear and volatile in nature, I decided to study journal articles to uncover realistic methods for these figures were determined. Hamed, Hussein and Tolba’s “An Intelligent Model for Stock Market Prediction” (2012) discusses how the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for financial market prediction functioned at that time. The paper describes how the model of the title is realised using Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), confirming its accuracy using an Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) test (Hamed, Hussein and Tolba, 2012 p.650). Simon and Raoot’s (2012) “Accuracy Driven Artificial Neural Networks In Stock Market Prediction” discusses how globalization influenced stock market prediction (SMP) accuracy, making it simultaneously more challenging and rewarding for stock market participants to publish this data (Simon & Raoot, 2012 p.650). Both of these papers accurately represent the advancements in machine learning that eventually evolved into the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) model described by Xie, Wang, Cai, Cao, Wang, Min and Deng in
their 2016 paper called “Empirical analysis: stock market prediction via extreme learning machine”. The analysis here is empirical, i.e. based on data designed to test the accuracy of this AI system when compared to the support vector machine (SVM) system, paying particular attention to the speed of online forecasting (Xie, Wang, Cai, Cao, Wang, Min & Deng, 2016 p.76-77). Because the data the paper studies is prediction based, these numbers can never be 100% accurate, however by using market news articles and stock tick prices as information sources and checking both algorithms to predict information integration and price movement, a model for financial market prediction was built that created outcomes leading to more profits with less risk.
I needed to trigger responses from the interviewees to the enthusiastic predictions surrounding growth of the VR/AR sector, so I carefully researched prediction markets in order to understand where these figures come from and how likely they were to be exaggerated.
This understanding has been strengthened by reading journal articles describing the history and purpose of prediction markets. The foundation for all subsequent reading on this subject was Shrier, Adjodah, Wu and Pentland’s ‘Prediction Markets’ (2016), which explains how in prediction markets there’s an asset and it’s value represents the probability of an event. People trade at the prices they negotiate over a transparent and open platform that is similar to a stock exchange, listing events instead of securities, using a ‘wisdom of the public’ model that favours opinions over beliefs. The reliability of this process can be checked not by whether people in the industry take them seriously, but by whether these systems are utilised in stock market prediction. The machine learning networks discussed are state of the art and intended to enable and enhance, rather than replace, the human decision making of the ‘wisdom of the public’ model it evolved from (Shrier, Adjodah, Wu and Pentland, 2016).
Wolfers and Zizewitz’s “Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities” (2006) is undoubtedly dated as it doesn’t discuss machine learning. Having been written as a response to Manski’s similarly dated (2004) paper “Interpreting the Predictions of Prediction Markets”, arguing that the previously accepted belief in analysing binary options to formulate realistic estimates of how the market will behave was accurate but needed extra work. He challenged the principle that had until then been widely agreed upon by arguing that when traders decide the price of contracts in prediction market speculation, evidence suggests that prediction market traders aren’t always treating prices of binary options as predictions of the probability of future events (Manski, 2004 p.8-10). This means that choices made by traders are weighted based on their beliefs. Wolfers and Zizewitz show convincing empirical evidence that expands Manski’s thesis by showing that prediction market prices definitely correspond with mean beliefs under certain conditions (Wolfers & Zizewitz, 2006 p.10-13). However under normal circumstances, Manski’s theory that choices are unfairly influenced by beliefs of traders is true, meaning that prediction market companies estimates are useful but often biased. This is useful to my research as it highlights how a corruptible, human based model was used previous to the machine learning model that is the industry standard now.
This shows that the margin of difference in the outcomes of prediction markets when machine learning isn’t used, is influenced by opinion. It highlights a minor fallibility in these systems and demonstrates that despite the capability of the systems to give accurate predictions, there is still risk involved. So evidence showing that prediction markets have higher accuracy over other forecasting methods still has to accept there are recent failures in this highly evolved model. In their paper “Predicting the failures of prediction markets: A procedure of decision making using classification models” by Tai, Lin, Chie and Tung (2019) observes that ‘Since prediction markets gave non-zero probabilities to “Leave” in Brexit and “Trump” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, one can defend prediction markets by contending that they did not really fail from the probability point of view. Because what (prediction markets) collected were people’s beliefs, the discrepancy between (prediction markets’) predictions and the actual results merely reflected the surprise nature of these two events ex ante.’ (Tai, Lin, Chie & Tung, 2019 p.297)
Therefore the existing literature doesn’t expose any reason to doubt enthusiastic predictions for the XR market. There is an interesting contradiction between this information and the insights given by people in the Irish industry that I explored further in the interviews with marketers conducted for this research paper.
2.6 Conceptual Framework
Throughout the research for this paper, it became clear there was a distinct gap in the literature in respect of the recently established VR/AR/XR sector in Ireland and the financial health of this industry in that location.
The work being undertaken by companies in Ireland demonstrates the potential for outcomes that will be beneficial to society through integration with other markets such as healthcare, retail, architecture and design. There are also benefits that have been even more widespread in training simulations.
The importance of presence and immersion in the practice of these companies highlights their roles in potential societal change. This is why it is important to examine the roles performed by the companies in this emerging market which was further pursued in the interviews held for this research.
Jeremy Bailenson’s “Experience On Demand” (Bailenson,2019) and Jaron Lanier’s
“Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality” (Lanier,2018) demonstrate the power of this technology and how it will have an influence on the future of humanity for better or worse depending on how it is used. Having researched Donghee Shin’s “Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment” (Shin,2018) I realised the importance of the concepts of presence and immersion to the projects created by the Irish companies in this sector who I interviewed in my research. I can classify specific projects using the EPI (Embodiment- Presence- Interactivity) Cube developed by Flavián, Ibáñez-Sánchez and Orús in ‘The Impact of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Technologies on the Customer Experience (Flavián et al,2019).
This understanding, combined with extensive research on strategies of market prediction have formed the conceptual framework for this paper. Relating the rich academic discussions of the technology to financial enthusiasm for the industry forms the foundation for this qualitative study.
2.7 Conclusion
Having conducted extensive research into the fields of virtual reality technology, its conceptual and philosophical significance, how presence and immersion engage users of the technology and papers relating to the VR/AR/XR industry, it is clear that there is a gap in the literature relating to how people involved with the industry respond to its predicted growth. There is also very little research relating to the VR/AR/XR industry that has emerged in Ireland. None of the researched articles have addressed the issue of how this growing sector in Ireland will develop in the coming years and why the worldwide predictions for this industry are so varied, but generally quite inflated. These fields of study can be integrated to create a better understanding of how the future of the VR/AR/XR industry will influence how those businesses can retain or develop their positions in this growing sector. The research of the articles in this literature review has clarified the research objectives for this paper, and has guided the data collection process in terms of what information should be gathered and from whom.
Methodology and Research Design
3.1 Introduction
This research strategy is based on a mix of descriptive and exploratory methods. When analysing the existing literature it can be seen that VR and AR is practised in various industries. However, the academic framework regarding XR in Ireland is minimal. For this reason I have identified my research purpose to be descriptive and exploratory. I felt an exploratory mindset for this research was necessary, because the VR/AR sector is relatively new in Ireland, so there are few academic papers discussing the role of the industry in this country. This lack of explicit theories, comprehensive research and literature around this topic encouraged my research method of interviewing successful people in this industry. Another important reason for this research to have an exploratory mindset was to present the findings and data that I have gathered in a way that could benefit readers from this and other sectors, giving ideas for future developments.The descriptive nature of this research was to identify the use of this technology from a branding perspective then deepen this understanding to outline how the sector can develop in the future.
The research uncovers deeper and more detailed information regarding the relationship between the sector and branding. Interviews with general open ended questions formed the main tools for my research, which will provide the interviewees with more freedom while gathering the data. This opens up the possibility of uncovering new information, which could not have been predicted beforehand. This will allow me to be flexible and make adjustments to the research I carried out following the interviews, allowing improvements to the research in general.
3.2 Research Method
Throughout my early study for this paper I was trying to ask very open questions about the VR/AR sector in Ireland. When I realised that by narrowing down to an aspect of the industry that interested me; the future success of the XR sector envisaged by stock market prediction, I realised that my research would be more original and likely to make new discoveries. Essentially the question I settled upon isn't an open one, meaning it could be answered with a “yes” or “no” answer. Therefore it is important that my work studies a variety of angles to increase its investigative potential. I have made sure to ask a question that can only be fully answered through immersing myself in the industry; deliberately choosing a question that these people would want to know the answer to.
By choosing a question that requires a lot of expansion, I avoid the subjective bias discussed by Flyvbjerg in his defence of the case study method (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Although I have developed opinions about AR and VR I’m focusing my study purely on the existing literature on the subject and the information I uncover through the interviews. According to Flyvberg, “(t)he advantage of the case study is that it can “close in” on real-life situations and test views directly in relation to phenomena as they unfold in practice.” (Flyvbjerg, 2006 p.235)
Astalin’s (2013) study of qualitative research was instrumental in the decision to make my study a case study. I realised that through examining the findings of previous VR/AR studies, my subsequent collection of individuals' opinions would give a richer and more nuanced insight into human interaction within the VR/AR industry. The case study method will allow me to better understand the development of this sector in Ireland. Siggelkow (2007) also discusses how case studies can provide more persuasive answers than extensive empirical research, so his paper influenced my methodology by confirming that my use of a multi-purpose method would fit the multi-dimensional objectives in the question I aimed to answer.
When planning my research I realised that I wanted to find out reliable information from people who were well established in the industry and could give their opinions about working in the VR/AR sector. This way I could find information from the individual perspective of experienced people and find out if there is a consistency in the opinions held by those at the management end of the industry in Ireland.
Throughout this inductive approach I will look for patterns in my observations through analysing existing texts and the perspective of people working in contemporary Irish VR/AR companies. This will lead to the development of theories that can be used by future VR/AR companies as this industry evolves. This appeared to be the best way to develop an in depth reflection of how the sector runs and how easy or hard it is to find clients.
By finding answers to these questions I could check the authority of the books and papers I had already read. Although the papers are written by people with a good academic understanding of the VR/AR industry, they are not necessarily written by people who actually work in the industry, so talking one-on-one with interviewees would either reflect the academic evidence I had collected or demonstrate that in practice these ideas are not adhered to. I considered that this would be especially important for the stock market prediction evidence I had collected about the growth of the VR/AR sector. I could find out how realistic people in the industry find these figures, adding a personal dimension to the data and thus making it easier for me to understand and present my findings in the paper.
This personal one-on-one setup also allows people to feel comfortable talking candidly about working in the industry. I haven’t designed my questions to ask anything awkward or challenging, however they are open enough to allow the interviewees to discuss their own personal opinions about subjects, perhaps giving more honest responses than they would in a focus group or at a conference.
Early on in the research process, I found two businesses to focus my study on, Mersus and VRAI. I contacted these companies and established communication with senior members of staff, improving my ability to analyse these businesses in the form of a case study. As I progressed with these communications, the interviewees in both of these studios organised a few more contacts that they thought I should interview. The general sense I had from my interviewees was that they were genuinely interested in my research and asked me to send it to them once I’m finished. I was informed that they previously had an intention to organise similar research for their market.
The studios confirmed which data I could obtain. The current work of both companies is classified as confidential, so I studied their prior achievements, generally focusing on previous work that had made an impact in the media and general business processes. There are opportunities for the interviewees to discuss unpublished information about their respective companies but this is left to the individuals being interviewed to decide.
The study therefore examines previous actions and the relationships of the firms that I have reached, especially ones they had developed with their clients and other companies. That's why I would describe the data this research has gathered as retrospective.
I made observations of archive material from all companies when planning my key informant interviews. The empirical evidence is limited to our initial question, regarding the projected statistics of the VR/AR market.
3.3 Methods of data collection
The interviews are identical and open-ended, consisting of 10 questions. This allows the participant to expand on each question. The specific topics have been planned to trigger responses that the participant can explore during the interview, with the freedom to ask their own questions if they want to. This allows each interview to be relevant to my own research, by ensuring everyone is asked the same thing but given an element of control. This helps the participant to feel comfortable during the discussion.
The reason why I haven't used an interview guide is to ensure the questions trigger truthful responses as opposed to answers that have been planned in order to make any specific “on brand” points. It is important that the participants don't answer as ambassadors to their own brand, so the answers are based on experience rather than the projection of a corporate identity.
Therefore it is important that they feel they are having a relaxed conversation. This would be derailed if they were given too much information beforehand.
It is important that the interviews happened in a comfortable space for the participant, so I ensured that they had the choice of where the interview took place. Generally, they were in their own workspace talking to me through Skype. I had experimented with using the same questions to interview friends and associates, working out an average length of the interview and adding 10 minutes to each in order to allow for more information from someone who was genuinely interested in the subject. Following this experiment I told the interviewees that we would talk for 30 to 45 minutes, which turned out to be correct for each participant.
3.4 Fieldwork
My field research consists of interviews, my own direct observation of the information gathered from them and the analysis of information presented by each interviewee. The informal nature of the interviews allowed each participant to share what they considered to be relevant information, including recommendations of further people to interview and discussions of how different companies in the XR sector intersect with each other.
This resulted in lots of interest in the results of the paper when finished, which implies that they are genuinely convinced I am creating a well structured and worthwhile piece of research. This interest in the outcomes of the research makes me confident that questions are answered truthfully and without outside corporate bias. This was confirmation of my level of involvement being correct, resulting in a close enough academic relationship with the data. The point of this being to visualise meanings in the data I had collected without being influenced to make unhelpful assumptions about the XR sector. I have retained an openness to their opinions, because I am essentially an outsider whose previous interest in XR was as a cultural phenomenon as opposed to a business sector. My interest in how these concepts have evolved into the marketplace was genuinely one of academic curiosity.
This open minded attitude meant I was better equipped to understand the way the culture of the XR industry influences the professional roles of the interviewees. I conducted the studies on their terms and always considered the interviews to be governed by the participants in their own territory to allow the qualitative outcomes that resulted from this work to be free from observer bias. This, along with the length and quantity of interviews ensured that I wouldn't be tempted to give explanations that were too theoretical or idealised in my conclusion.
3.5 Participants
Alex Gibson works for the School of Marketing at Dublin Institute of Technology – He is the Assistant Head of School, an VR/AR Innovate founder as well as an VR/AR sector advisor for TechIreland, an independent not for profit company established to promote Irish and Ireland based IT innovation.. He also presents a weekly radio programme on marketing issues called ‘The Persuaders’. For more information: http://arvrinnovate.com/pf/24940/
Niall Campion is the Founder and Managing Director of VR/AR company VRAI,
https://fora.ie/vrai-dublin-virtual-reality-4093096-Jul2018/
For more information: https://vrai.ie/about-us-virtual-reality-company /
Geoffrey Allen is the CEO of Mersus. For more information: http://mersus.io/about-us/
Camille Donegan is a Virtual Reality Consultant who is the general manager/producer of Virtual Reality Ireland, a company working with film and theatre actors, writers and directors on various VR projects. She also independently makes presentations about VR as VR Camille.
For more information: http://www.vrcamille.com/
James Corbett - CEO and Co-founder and Managing Director of Simvirtua, a company that operates as a consultancy for multi-user VR and AR experiences for marketing, training, manufacturing, well-being, retail and education.
https://www.simvirtua.com
Thomas Strimbu - Founder of Voxel Revolution Consulting, a company that develops VR and AR programmes for businesses. https://www.voxelrevolution.com/about-us/
3.6 The Questions
1. Do you think that VR has become an essential tool for businesses today?
Despite being a yes or no question I intend to encourage the participant to demonstrate their personal opinions about the current state of the industry, setting the tone of the rest of the interview.
2. What’s the current state of the VR/AR market within Ireland and is Brexit causing concern to companies?
This question is structured to provoke the interviewee into discussing something that has political and financial implications to the industry. Discussing something that will have a huge effect on business intends to deepen the conversation so I can get an idea of how people in the industry respond to potential crisis.
3. As the growth of the VR/AR market depends on the growth of complementary technologies like 5G and hardware, predictions concerning the VR/AR market size vary. Seeing as the forecast figures are all positive, does this make you feel confident?
This is basically the question of the paper, so I can get the perspective of how the managers of VR/AR company feel about the huge predicted worth of the industry. It makes mention of hardware in order to encourage the participants to link their responses to something that is undeniable circumstance in the industry.
4. Where would you consider the position of your studio or company within this market as it expands?
This question narrows down the response of the last two questions to their own position in the industry in relation to all the other companies. It offers a chance for studios to give a perspective on their own position. Other non studio companies can expand on their role in the market.
5. What are the key reasons and motivations for a brand to use VR for business purposes?
This uncovers how the company relates to clients and what they do for them. By following a question explicitly about competition in the VR/AR market I can expose more about how integrated the industry is.
6. How much difference does it make to use VR/AR related materials in such businessstrategies?
This deepens the previous question but allows the participant to underline what they do.
7. Please talk about how ideologies are used in the production of your company’s VR/AR content. Is the aim to create neutral content or appeal to specific markets?
Here, I’m progressing the conversation towards a more identity focused political explanation of the VR/AR market’s practice. It is inspired by the first book I read about VR, Jeremy Bailenson’s “Experience On Demand” (2019) which discussed the potential for VR/AR to be utilised in propaganda.
8. Please talk about how the consumer influences the production of your company’s VR/AR content. To what extent are game testing, surveys and customer feedback used?
This question should trigger some feedback about the history of the VR/AR industry and how the development of the industry will affect casual consumers of VR/AR content.
9. How could the location in Ireland of the European Headquarters of big investors such as Google, Apple and Facebook influence the uprising of the VR/AR market?
This question ensures that the interviewees definitely discuss their relationships with bigger companies.
10. Is now a good time to consider using VR/AR within a company and is the market ever likely to become oversaturated?
This question gives the participant a chance to reinforce the main points they wish to make.
I have deliberately asked questions that allow the interviewee to talk about issues they have already discussed but from a different perspective.
3.7 Methods of data analysis
The data collected in the interviews was transcribed by myself personally. Following this I made a thematic analysis by sketching out the general responses, first of all by focusing on the closed questions, then expanding this with the open questions. This system allowed me to develop a systematic reading of the data, so that when I listed the general points mentioned by the participants in the answering of the questions it was easier to separate the different opinions. These were written as single sentence bullet points in each question, working through the participants one at a time. The explicit data, i.e. directly stated information that is clear in its intention, was written in black. The implicit data, i.e. information that was more subtly suggested in the answers, was written in red. By ensuring that this division was stuck to, I avoided diluting the intended message of each participant. Because the interviews didn't have fixed responses I could create a data set that represented a subjective examination of each individual's personal experiences in the industry. If a participant gave an answer that was relevant to another question I pasted this information in blue to show that it is an important subject if it warrants further mentions.
This phenomenological study required a deductive approach, meaning that I aimed to analyse this data using pre existing frameworks, i.e. I wanted to find out how the interviewees felt about their own position in the Irish XR industry hierarchy, where in this structure they considered their companies to be heading and whether data presented as predictions of the international XR industry were accurate. My epistemological analysis was then conducted by relating this data set to pre-existing literature.
Realist outcomes I was aiming for acknowledge a social world of communication within the industry, which is what the questions were composed to expose. I gained an accurate representation of the VR/AR industry in Ireland by creating real life professional bonds with the participants. There is no pre-existing data about how these companies feel about the predicted figures, so I created a qualitative piece of research, the realist outcomes of which offer new insights that were inaccessible through the study of facts and figures.
3.8 Ethics and Access
Participants who work in a business environment needed to be reassured that this was a serious piece of research intending to discover new information about the VR/AR industry. I was expecting to be invited to a meeting at most organisations in order to present and discuss my access request, however everyone I approached by email or telephone found my initial communication worthy of response. I composed the emails and phone calls to deliberately reflect my passionate interest in the history and social aspects of the VR/AR industry, demonstrating that I had done prior research. I knew that the interviewees would be interested in the paper I’m writing, but I needed to make sure they trusted me so it was vital to demonstrate professionalism and proper procedure. My initial emails always clearly presented my requirements, namely to record a 30-45 minute interview with each participant, within which they could choose how long to talk for.
After talking with my supervisor, she confirmed that a verbal consent to be taken from my interviewees was sufficient. So before starting each interview, I asked my interviewees to confirm their willingness to participate in this research.
I added a disclaimer to the questions saying “All interviewees, regardless of position in their respective agencies will be given the same questions... Please try to answer each one to the best of your ability.” I read this out before progressing with each interview so the participants remember to answer from their personal perspective.
3.9 Potential Disadvantages
This research process did have some potential disadvantages, for example setting up interviews can be time consuming. However, seeing as I had already been in contact with many of the people I intended to interview and many recommended other people for me to conduct interviews with, this decreased the disadvantage.
Transcribing, analysing and reporting my findings took a lot of time, but despite this I managed to analyse the data in the 10 days days after all interviews were completed.
I will avoid personal bias in this process by transcribing the interviews as precisely as possible. I’m also worried that I might occasionally not understand the Irish accent, so I’ll be sure to transcribe these interviews with a helper nearby, so when I don’t understand a word I can play the track to a native English speaker.
Presentation and Analysis of the Findings
4.1 Overview
From 1993 to around 2010, consumer-level VR had moved out of the zeitgeist due to the technology not being ready. As Mims explains in “Whatever Happened to ... Virtual Reality?” (2010) “Computers in 1993 just weren’t fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual”. Throughout this time, media interest waned while the industry continued developing the technology, with the aim of resolving nausea and fatigue; the main issues holding back the VR experience in that time, while simultaneously developing Augmented Reality solutions in laboratories (NASA, 2004).
In 2014, following Facebook's purchase of gaming headset Oculus Rift, VR's mainstream viability once again became apparent to the masses. This renaissance was made possible by the decreasing cost of technology combined with upgraded computing power, making VR experiences more accessible. As technology advanced, the scientists who had built the industry became concerned that market forces became more influential meaning the scientists would have less power.
By acknowledging the problems emerging in the industry during this era, it is easy to forget the positive changes that were developing. New hardware that was accessible and becoming more affordable would lead to new investment opportunities. The world was indisputably experiencing a VR renaissance. The VR industry could only work at its full potential when the technology had caught up with the conceptual ideas. Now the purchase of a VR company was making headlines, corporate entities were making very promising predictions about the potential worth of this industry.
The sector in Ireland was becoming well established and with multinational corporations such as Apple having set up a manufacturing plant in Holyhill, above Cork in 1980. This company famously blackmailed the Irish government to agree to a deal to tax only a small bracket of its earnings in 1991, giving them a greatly diminished tax rate than it would have had to pay in America. Google had moved to the country to set up European Headquarters for the same tax avoidance purposes in 2003, Microsoft sought a similar deal when they opened their Live EMEA Data centre in 2009 at Grangecastle, Dublin and Facebook followed this strategy in 2018 (Fintan O’Toole, 2018).
These factors intersected to create the interesting VR/AR/XR industry that is thriving today. In order to explore these themes more deeply I have conducted a series of open ended interviews with experts working in Irish VR companies. This information was recorded and transcribed, then data was extracted in the way I explained in 3.7 Methods of data analysis, unbundling these concepts through an extensive narrative that is followed by a more easily comprehensible set of research and strategic conclusions later on in the chapter.
4.2 Findings
I identified the emerging themes of this paper in the Literature Review as being ‘The Development of the Industry’, ‘The VR/AR Renaissance’, ‘Presence and Immersion’ and ‘Market Analysis’. I have adapted these titles to reflect the development in comprehension of the market I have gained through examining the transcriptions of the interviews to; ‘The Practice of VR/AR/XR Companies’, ‘Industry Security’,
‘Competition and Collaboration’, ‘Altruism’ and ‘Are the Projections Believable?’ Through analysing these themes I will be able to answer my research question.
4.2.1 The Practice of VR/AR/XR Companies
Understanding what each company does was an important part of building comprehension in order to answer the question. However, during the interviews the decision to not ask specifically about what each interviewees’ company does allowed this information to be told in a less direct way, leading to more detailed discussions of the practice from a first person perspective.
NC. “A phrase I have always used is, ‘They don’t remember what you say or do, they remember how you make them feel’”
Niall Campion frequently talks about how people feel when they are using the technology, so presence and immersion are clearly vital elements to what he does. In working with companies in the implementation of virtual reality and augmented reality content, creativity and altruism intersect with VRAI’s savvy marketing sense. He frequently talks about having “personal experience” with brands, so building an emotional connection to products and corporations. Feelings are never discussed in an emotional way, for example when he discusses the project for the UN to train soldiers to clear IEDs in Somalia he talks with pride about the safety benefits his technology affords people rather than how many lives are saved, instead focusing on the financial benefits, “in certain scenarios to train for it can be quite expensive (in programmes using live actors) so if you have to do a complex scenario involving multiple actors in VR you can recreate that once with all your actors and then train in it as many times as you want. So literally every time you train in it you’re saving yourself money.”
Camille Donegan’s work as a Virtual Reality consultant for Virtual Reality Ireland emerged from a background in theatre, film and computer science. She has to connect businesses to VR resolutions to their enquiries. “We’re known in Ireland for being quite dynamic and prolific so we produce a lot of content and we do that quite quickly”. She often describes how it makes business sense to agree to work with a lot of clients; “we’ve had over a dozen projects in the last year, 2 of which won awards and we push ourselves very hard when we’re working on a project and several of those have been the first of their kind” however she discusses the importance of retaining a good balance between creativity and delivering efficient outcomes “we get really interesting enquiries from a really broad spectrum of clients. So for instance yesterday I was talking with a major drinks brand and they know they want to do some sort of AI VR activation but they don’t really know where to begin… it seems to be a much deeper conversation really if you show four or five relevant use cases maybe ours or maybe from international projects of people doing something really well that would apply to their brand or what they’re looking to do and then say ‘which one of these do you wanna do?’ because otherwise the thinking is too big and you can’t decide on any proof of concept or possible solution”. She makes presentations about VR/AR/XR technology, so her anecdotes of projects she has been involved with created a lot of good context in the interviews.
James Corbett expands this description of consultancy work with his company Simvirtua in describing the whole process of assisting a Japanese pharmaceutical company with manufacturing locations in Ireland to adopt VR/AR technology. They create a feasibility model and walk the company through the whole process of developing (often new) cutting edge resolutions to their clients’ needs. “They’re going ahead with at least two projects. I don’t think they even see them as pilot projects but the start of adopting VR technology. If a company is big enough and they have deep enough pockets they see that it’s ready for adoption and use now.” This structured process takes precedence over creativity, meaning his answers give vital insight into the business structure of the sector.
Alex Gibson’s education role in the School of Marketing at Dublin Institute of Technology gives his answers a sense of academic authority, which means he is quite opinionated in terms of the Irish sector. Being an VR/AR Innovate founder gives him the ability to draw from lots of practical experience as well; “An area where I originally started doing research is in tourism, where VR is widely used now by a lot of travel agents in the travel agency shop to create an extra retail experience”. Lots of his answers show a clear intersection between his knowledgeable engagement and dedicated corporate investment.
Geoffrey Allen, CEO of Mersus was an early advocate of VR. Experience in film and conventional art transitioned into the practical application of the technology, giving his answers an authority grounded in his experience of finding creative solutions to business problems, particularly in training; “we’ve switched over into training in live science mode. Ireland has a huge big cluster of sciences and we are focusing now on training in that space, because what the VR allows you to experience can lead to very sophisticated value propositions.”
Thomas Strimbu is the founder of consultation company Voxel Revolution Consulting. His answers give good insight into his problem solving strategies, often emphasizing short but very intuitive observations; “as a consultant I help them to understand what it is how it integrates into their digital transformation strategy and what steps they take to implement it.” He often references empirical business statistics so it is clear he follows the industry closely, giving his strategic observations extra weight.
4.2.2 Industry Security
One of the questions that this research intended to explore was the security of the VR/AR/XR industry in general. Considering the false starts encountered during the growth of the industry I can uncover data to understand how the companies are visualising the future of their sector when this renaissance phase ends.
James Corbett’s observation in 4.2.1 that if a company can afford it they will want to adopt the technology is especially relevant when considering that many of the interviewees agree with the parallels with web design in the early 2000s, which he later mentioned, saying; “it feels like we're ‘94, ‘95 maybe ‘96 in terms of web and it’s going to look very obvious in a few years time. That you will be late if you don’t have a 3D spatial web strategy let's think about the 3D web that’s where we’re focused now.”
This suggestion exposes the assumption that mass adoption of VR/AR/XR technology is inevitable. Certainly, both Lanier and Bailenson offer good arguments suggesting the technology is here to stay. Of course links can be made to Lanier’s concern that the industry could become an industry where exploitation is the norm, “(p)ull back the curtain of AR and there (will be) millions of exploited people.” (Lanier,618). Thomas Strimbu also considers this to be inevitable, “Today, you can find a website developer in India who will make a site for literally $20, and I do believe that we would get there with XR technology as well…. so are we going to be able to find 3D developers very inexpensively? the answer is ‘yes’.” He also believes that oversaturation of the market is an inevitability and with that oversaturation there is little differentiation among the products being produced, consequently driving down the price. Although he doesn’t use the same analogy, Alex Gibson says, “I think if companies aren’t doing it now they run the risk of really missing a big opportunity when this becomes more mainstream.
Absolutely they should be putting time and resources into this now.” Are these business people blinded by their enthusiasm for early adoption? Truthfully, this could only be an accurate prediction if the technology could become as accessible as the tools required to become a web developer, i.e. access to a computer and an internet connection. Currently however, VR is not something that can be created by someone on a budget. The hardware is prohibitively expensive and on top of this it is not easy to access or learn how to use the software required to make VR programmes.
Geoffrey Allen agrees with this hypothesis, suggesting that “in the web market, you got people who want websites for 300 Euros and that won’t happen with VR market because to get a professional enduring VR experience takes UX design, UI design, it takes all the relevant visualisation, it takes the scripting, it takes the narrative and all that so it’s not a simple case.” Therefore I think it is more likely that the VR/AR/XR market will only ever be accessible as a means of income for people who can afford this hardware, software and training. Arguably, unless community centres and libraries begin to facilitate access to VR/AR/XR technology, it isn’t ever going to be accessible to the masses in the way that personal computers became in the 90s without discrimination. Therefore I believe there will always be a big divide between the consumers and the companies who develop VR/AR/XR applications.
Camille Donegan’s observation that “if you don’t have a website now it’s too late. How useful are they now? They only appeal to a particular demographic or business usually” can perhaps be true about certain companies, but this technology can only serve very specific purposes. Although creative teams will continue to push the technology into new areas while the industry is still on the rise, comparing it with the web in this way is a false equivalency. Geoffrey Allen offers another caveat showing that VR can’t follow the path of web design, that “the actual value proposition to create what we do takes a lot of people and in fact that is going to be a barrier of entry”, meaning that only dedicated teams will get to the stage where they are able to compete in the market. Web design became a commodity thanks to it being raised from the bottom using relatively cheap equipment that was accessible to anyone willing to put in the time to learn the software. This created a cottage industry where people were running successful companies and competing against professional service companies from their bedrooms. This decimated the industry because the majority of consumers will look at the bottom line and its cost and will be very likely to choose to employ someone at the lowest pay bracket. There are too many factors preventing VR/AR/XR from becoming a cottage industry to make this comparison to the web design industry realistic.
The balance of power between the smaller Irish companies and multinationals who have set up in Ireland in recent years such as Google, Facebook and Apple feature heavily in the interviews. The decisions made by these companies will have a lot of influence on each interviewee’s success or failure in the next decade. In all interviews at least one of these multinational companies is mentioned. It’s not unrealistic to posit that these companies will be making the decisions when the industry hits its peak. According to Geoffery Allen; “my leanings are towards Google dominating in this space now… because they’re established and a lot of the new hardwares are using their operating systems and I hear about Apple coming out into that in 2021. They’d be established in the market by then because as I say the groove I expect will accelerate. the hardware has improved tremendously over the last 12 months so if you extrapolate that out into the next 24 months and 36 months and then Apple is going to arrive.” This certainty that a multinational company will aim to take the lion's share of the business sounds like a realistic prediction. Niall Campion reflects that “we personally have had no dealings with Apple in spite of trying a few times to get in contact with them. They just don’t seem that interested in dealing with the developer community in Ireland specifically.” This implies that there is a divide between the bigger companies and the local Irish ones, so many of the companies have developed strategies to build professional relationships. Niall Campion says; “we’ve just completed a program with Google “adopt a startup”. They give you mentorship as a startup they guide you and tell you how to scale your business so they are very active in trying to activate the tech community inside their own walls. Facebook have been doing something broadly similar, they run a lecture series which is more elective as opposed to an interactive programme.” This shows that the multinationals are possible to engage with. According to Camille Donegan; “Google have helped me with a couple of events when I needed headsets and I was looking for people to bring Temprush to a dance festival so that artists could try VR they helped me with that. So if you have a contact and a specific ask usually they’ll help but I think we can build on that and progress it a lot more in the future.” It is clear that interest in collaborating with these companies, Donegan continues; “what we’re finding at the moment and we’re hopeful this will change is that there is not a massive engagement between the multinationals and the community”.
Some descriptions of these companies acknowledge their power through an almost conspiratorial uncertainty of their motivations. Alex Gibson observes that “at the moment, my sense is that (Apple) operate very much on their own terms. I guess it’s because what they are working on is highly secret, they’re working on the latest iterations of head glasses and software and tools etcetera, so there’s not really a huge amount of interface with the local ecosystem at the moment, that’s my sense”. Thomas Strimbu continues in this vein. “What is based here for Facebook and Microsoft? I know that Facebook does some content monitoring, but I don’t see much research and development here which is what we should be asking from them. Do we have any form of competitive advantage to offer and the answer really is No. However, Ireland has a wonderful competitive advantage in their financial regulations so American businesses love to operate here because of beneficial taxes.”
The observation that multinational companies are moving in to Ireland for tax breaks is an important element of the industry in the country. If the companies find it beneficial to be in Ireland for this reason it would make sense to give something back by engaging closely with the already established companies. James Corbett suggests making more direct interactions with the multinationals, “I run events, a VR meetup called 3D camp Dublin and Irish VR and we have had the likes of Google, some of their people came along a few times. DAQRI the headset makers they have come along they're good supporters and we have kind of personal relationships with them but I think to put it on a more formal footing for the industry is the challenge.”
To summarise, the interviewees are confident that their industry is secure, but until there is more constructive dialogue between the bigger multinational companies and the smaller Irish ones there will be a concern that they have the potential to become a powerful and hard to pacify threat to the sector. There is interest in collaboration and if any of the big companies reached out to any of the people I have spoken to they would be pleased to participate.
“I don’t see it becoming a mainstream tool for 3-5 years”
4.2.3 Competition and Collaboration
This industry is incredibly competitive, so it’s important to find out how secure the companies feel among both their local and international competitors. As confirmed in 4.2.2, oversaturation is less of a concern for already established Irish companies and many welcome the potential of new companies forming as people leave the multinationals in order to start new VR/AR/XR enterprises in Ireland.
There is a sense of community growing in the industry, as Thomas Strimbu, Alex Gibson and Camille Donegan all mentioned that they have an initiative to bring emerging companies together under an Umbrella company called Eirmersive. This strategy runs parallel to TechIreland, which is an independent not for profit company promoting not just VR/AR/XR but according to their mission statement, “Irish and Ireland based innovation to the world through data, content and community activities”. Although this statement boasts that “TechIreland has made Ireland’s startup ecosystem visible and tangible to all stakeholders for the very first time. In 2019 and beyond our mission will be sustained through the support of larger Irish companies and innovation driven multinationals in Ireland.” Only Alex Gibson mentions (“The VR/AR market is quite small in Ireland in terms of number of companies you have probably been directed already to the TechIreland website because that gives you a full picture of all the companies that are in the space and also different types of virtual markets that they serve”) this company in the interviews and seeing as he works as one of their advisors yet he goes into more detail about Eirmersive, this suggests that Eirmersive could be an attempt to build up a powerful linking body with the specialisation of VR/AR/XR companies. Camille Donegan also is listed on the TechIreland website as an advisor, so it would appear this company is an attempt to build stronger links in Ireland’s VR/AR/XR sector.
TechIreland proudly boasts participation from multinationals such as Google and Dell. It also promotes conferences and creates shareable documents such as the Irish Augmented/ Virtual Reality Startup Map (Appendix 8). This serves as a status map for companies who have made it onto the TechIreland platform. The statistics it boasts are that 38% of these companies were founded since 2016, the industry has a total funding is €50M+, with 13% of new companies being female founded. This is clearly a good promotional body to be a part of and gives lots of local recent startups a status.
However, if we juxtapose the benefits of being involved with the fact that each local Irish VR/AR/XR company will be competing for attention from 2482 other companies involved with the umbrella, this adds further credence to the idea that Eirmersive is in a better position to make a startup stand out from the crowd. Eirmersive can essentially be seen as a subdivision of the tech sector in Ireland, which has the potential to create strength in numbers when the sector is big enough to attract specific attention. In these respects Eirmersive stands out as an alternative to TechIreland. Their mission statement says “Eirmersive intends to promote Ireland as the hub for best-in-class immersive technologies in Europe”, however it could also be a strategy for reversing a slowing down of growth in the industry, about which Thomas Strimbu says “Something that could speed it up would be companies like Eirmersive who are trying to find tax breaks for companies who are working in the area. That would of course speed the technology and adoption.” This would of course make this umbrella company seem like an even more attractive option for companies in this sector.
Geoffrey Allen unequivocally describes his company Mersus as industry leaders, so his explicit description of bonds with contemporaries gives some good insights into where each company fits in the perceived hierarchy. This is backed up by Niall Campion’s observation that “We would always like to see ourselves as being at the leading edge in the grand scheme of things but we’re probably not that big a company at the moment'' which following Allen’s declaration that the number of employees will “be a barrier of entry” to prevent smaller businesses from participating in an industry that already has so many well established specialised companies. “Internationally there are companies of up to 300 people making VR training content but what we think we do uniquely is we have a different approach to how we make the product for example we use a lot of video content as well as a lot of interactive content, so were always looking at what other technology we can bring in so we wouldn’t define ourselves as just a VR and AR company it’s more about using the smartest technologies to train in an efficient way.” Although the companies I interviewed have a variety of different roles in the industry, the main differing factor appears to be their clients. For example Thomas Strimbu didn’t answer question 8 because he said the words consumer and customer weren’t relevant to him due to his company Voxel Revolution Consulting, being a developer of AR and VR programs for businesses. It unnecessary to read anything into this.
Through examining companies like Eirmersive it is clear that a sense of community is a big feature of cultural branding used in the industry. The oversaturation question (10) is still relevant when discussing how the smaller companies interact with each other, although James Corbett’s answer; “Nowadays there’s a very good business for a certain amount of really good web development companies but that became totally oversaturated and the same thing will happen with AR and VR but that's a good sign of a healthy market isn’t it?” exposes a core belief in business, that competition is good. This is immediately contradicted by his declaration that “we have to be quite neutral and objective and if we think that another development studio, maybe a competitor of ours can do a better job we have to tell the client that, because the client comes first and we have to do the best by them.” This seemingly altruistic comment could be interpreted as an invitation to compete, but perhaps companies in this industry are more likely to survive if they have a specialisation. As Alex Gibson says; “I think we will see more specialised studios with specialised skill sets and competencies for certain areas, for example studios who focus just on training and maybe even virtual reality training and maybe even more specialised than that”. The VR/AR/XR industry isn’t very big at the moment, so this idea that focusing a company’s practice on a very distinct skill set creates a good chance to make a company survive makes sense if this means it will increase mutual support within the sector.
Additionally, projects like content studio VRAI’s simulation to train soldiers to find IEDs in Somalia or the many psychological programmes currently being developed to assist patients to cope with pain or anxiety are keeping the industry in the news. By developing forums for practitioners to develop professional relationships the industry appears to be an attractive sector to become enrolled in. This is why the competition being so high can actually promote positive growth, because if people leave the multinational companies and form new VR/AR/XR companies; like War Ducks, who were formed by Nicky Lannen who left Google to create her own spinoff games company that specialises in mobile VR and AR games, it shows not only that the multinationals are not only allowing but encouraging a more interactive business space to be opened up. As Niall Campion says; “Google employs, I think, 6000 or 9000 people (in Dublin) and as those people leave Google and set up their own companies, this fosters an entrepreneur culture in the city.”
Although this general consensus that the companies support each other sounds positive, the true future of the industry worldwide is something that is still being speculated to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
4.2.4 Altruism
An element of the industry that is making it secure is its usefulness to society in altruistic ways.
In “Co-branding strategy in cause-related advertising: the fit between brand and cause”, Huertas-García, Lengler and Consolación-Segura suggest that by supporting a social cause that fits with the band of the company creating the intervention is likely to appear more sincere. In the case of the VR/AR/XR industry, projects are only selected if they have a complex problem to solve in a way that has neve been done before. This means that simply by creating work, the companies are actively establishing unsuspicious brand-cause alliance. This prevents issues of consumers or potential clients doubting sincerity since the marketing that follows; at least during this renaissance phase of the industry. In “Altruism: Brand management or uncontrollable urge?”, Daniel Read outlines in psychological terms that being altruistic creates a valuable personal brand, altruistic acts being part of the process of brand building (Read, 2002, p.271). There is a good argument to be made for just letting the desire to make the world better happen naturally, as Huertas-Garcia actually recommends that branded companies carrying out altruistic work are discreet about these interventions, “leaving the main role of communication to the cause, could increase the brand image much more than excessive prominence” (Huertas-García, Lengler & Consolación-Segura, 2016, p.26). This is certainly true in the publicity that results from a VR/AR/XR company making an altruistic intervention as this often comes from newspapers taking an interest in the futuristic implications of using the technology to ease suffering.
In discussing some work his company is doing for a pharmaceutical company, James Corbett said “in the very first meeting they said that any (of my company’s work) for them is a change in management process more so than an IT project, it’s about any piece of technology coming into the company, the people have to want to use it. If people can’t see how it’s making their job easier or if they think the technology could replace their job”. This is an example showing that in this phase of VR/AR development the technology is still being used in a responsible way, albeit only because this particular company dealing with VRAI happen to care about the job protection and the wellbeing of their staff. This particular (anonymous) company wishes to adopt VR as an asset to their business practice rather than something that can be used to save money by cutting staff, which exposes another benefit of the current VR/AR/XR market landscape, dealing with forward thinking companies.
Camille Donegan describes an app her company Virtual Reality Ireland called “dreams away”. “It’s a meditation app and with that product the viewer can be in their stressful office and then they step into the meeting room and put on the headset and they’re transported into a beautiful place in Ireland like Glen da Loch or Hilla Tara and they can choose what kind of voice over or meditation they might like to combine with the footage.” Concepts of presence and immersion are relevant to this app, Shin (2018) describes how “immersion can be a part of a cognitive dimension that includes consciousness, awareness, empathizing, embodying, and contextualizing helping users assimilate into VR”. This is another example of how a product has been made that would be incredibly useful to the general public if they had access to it. Donegan continues, “we specifically don’t create consumer geared products at this point. The meditation app probably will have a consumer download but that’s further down the road for that product”. This clarifies that apps such as these will potentially be accessible as content, however it will still only be accessible to consumers who own a headset. Shin’s descriptions of immersion show that this kind of app will enable a level of understanding that should be accessible to everyone. A confirmation of this positive progression is that, “we (Virtual Reality Ireland) have partnerships with a couple of hospitals and we’ve provided content that can help patients with reminiscence, for example where they can use Google Earth and they can go to their favourite place in Florence virtually, albeit that they’re tied to the hospital for whatever reason.”
The interviewees all focused on very practical elements of building a presence in the marketplace. The industry would appear to be here to stay but there is a lot of evidence that if it campaigned to increase access the industry will achieve better exposure. In a small country like Ireland it is important that the industry takes steps to ensure that it works towards universal access as the industry grows.
4.2.5 Are the Projections Believable?
In this section I have listed the answers to the question; “As the growth of the VR/AR market depends on the growth of complementary technologies like 5G and hardware, predictions concerning the VR/AR market size vary. Seeing as the forecast figures are all positive, does this make you feel confident?”. Answers from one participant at a time are presented and commented on in order to present as much data as possible in reviewing the responses.
As discussed in the Literature Review, Wolfers and Zizewitz’s “Interpreting Prediction
Market Prices as Probabilities” (2006) and Charles F. Manski’s “Interpreting the Predictions of Prediction Markets” (2004) are the only papers that suggested convincing evidence that the predicted figures regarding the growth of the international VR/AR sector were wrong.
Since market predictions are now made with algorithms it is harder for them to make errors unless something very unpredictable happens.
Alex Gibson
“...it will grow but the speed of that growth I think we need to be much more sanguine and conservative about and understand the agenda of why some of these projections have been put into the marketplace.”
This observation respects the potential accuracy of the 2018 predictions and it is fair to suggest that the data may not reach the extreme heights estimated by the market research report companies.
“One of the reasons they are so high is that there is a need from a lot of the companies for funding from investors so when you talk to companies, a lot of them are waiting for funds so when you have a sector like this you tend to give a lot of excessive inflation of the projections because of the financial issue because companies want to attract the interest of investors”
These comments suggest that the companies are corrupting the figures in order to attract more investors. This is a less acceptable idea due to the way the data is arrived at, as described in section 2.5.
“because certainly the companies, it’s in their interests to report huge growth, huge interest, huge demand because for many of them their primary challenge at the moment isn’t about revenue, it isn’t about profit but it is about funding and they need to show that this is a huge sector.”
Thomas Strimbu
“The caveat that I can grant that would make the projected figures not come true is some kind of broader economic downturn, let’s say Brexit hits Europe harder in some kind of unseen way that causes recession or Trump and his trade war with China, impacting the price of technology coming from Taiwan or China. Any of these externalities could have an impact on a year or two that is slowing growth.”
This is the kind of unpredictable event that could cause the predictions to be inaccurate.
“If you are asking large companies like Microsoft or Facebook, the answer is definitely yes. If the question is should Geoff from Mersus have the right to be confident or should I be confident I think the answer is definitely not.”
This is definitely a fair observation. The figures predicted by the market research report companies are not arrived at to refer to smaller companies in the sector. However, Geoffery Allen does consider Merser to be a market leader.
“For somebody who is not well capitalised the timeline for mass market adoption is so long that even if its only 2-5 years that’s still so long to remain afloat that there’s no reason for confidence. The larger guys that are well capitalised will definitely see the rewards.”
Strimbu’s comments are all quite believable and although he doesn’t suggest the figures are accurate he is aware that they won’t be completely erroneous.
Geoffrey Allen
“Absolutely not because I would question the research... I think people are consultants, the big four and those kind of people are telling people what they want to hear so of course they are trying to drum up business for themselves and besides from that… No, it concerns me greatly, I see telephone numbers thrown out on a regular basis and I question the justification for it. They’re talking billions…”
This outright denial of the data is unrealistic when considering the justifications of the machine learning systems utilised in making these predictions. However, it is worth acknowledging here that the companies who create the data are very secretive about how they arrive at their figures, so any truth in these accusations is admittedly not impossible.
Now I do have some reasonable market insights myself, and in the entertainment space I know Sony are ahead by 1% of where their target was they have 5% rather than 4% and that’s big in itself and they’re very happy but in industrial IOT VR and AR applications it’s non existent.’’
This does relate Allen’s doubts of the accuracy of the figures to experience and an understanding of the market, so this does create grounds for reasonable skepticism.
James Corbett
“You know, we’ve been hearing so much about forecasts over the last 6 years I don’t really pay too much attention to them but in general terms the sense we’re getting on the ground is there is more reason to be confident. That’s a combination of things, the conversations were having about the belief in the technology. Not among tech people like ourselves but people doing other things, other industries and businesses, they understand that this technology is something that can be useful and create good outcomes in their businesses”
Corbett seems to accept the figures. It is possible that he is involved with enough big businesses to reap some of the potential benefits if the figures are correct, meaning he would have more reason to be sympathetic to the figures.
Camille Donegan
“Not really! I think that anyone whos in this industry knows that we’ve been tarnished by smoke and mirror campaigns online, so people all saw an augmented reality demonstration of a whale jumping ahead of the sports hall and went “Woh, clearly that’s possible” and augmented reality, while it’s amazing, it only really works on a much smaller scale activation. So yeah you might have a whale jumping out of something but it’s only going to be the coffee cup on your table.”
This is a good observation. Was the data chosen by the algorithms that created the prediction market data based on such exaggerations? The demonstration she mentions here could have taken place in very controlled conditions, which would be a good way to unpack the understandable mental jump made by people who could make the assumption that the large scale demonstration they experienced could be presented anywhere.
“So in terms of market predictions I personally take them with a grain of salt. Most of the research that I’ve read looked more closely in Ireland were suggesting that the appetite to buy here is two to three years away… to the technology being pretty ubiquitous, where every company would be very interested in having an immersive technology focus. For whatever reason Ireland can be quite slow to adopt new technologies. In some sectors in particular if you look at our tourism sector, a lot of tourism sites don’t even have a good website, let alone an app, let alone being ready to do AR and VR.”
This does sound like a genuine concern. This is why the work of consultants is so important in the Irish industry, to disseminate this information and let people know that the technology is ready to benefit people. Allowing more of the general public to experience the technology is a vital part of ensuring that the smaller companies in the Irish sector acquire a share of the wealth as the industry grows.
“So, market predictions, for me are much more a case of wait and see. I don’t think the market predictions reflect the appetite to buy or the adoption in Ireland. Unfortunately if you look what’s happening in the UK and how far ahead they are in the immersive technology sector in terms of the amount of work that has been produced and the return on investment they are seeing, we’re way behind and that’s primarily because in 2014 the UK saw what was coming and they multiplied by 9 the amount of investment they were putting into immersive technology.
This demonstrates the requirements companies have to be supported by the government to make new sectors grow. This would reduce the benefit of a massive market growth for all companies involved, although companies who are already rich and are using Ireland as a tax haven would be less affected. Again, this demonstrates the difficulty of being in a small company.
“It’s hard for every company no matter where you are in the world to be sustainable at this point and my predictions are that in two or three years that will shift and then the money’s going to flow in and we’re all gonna be multimillionaires (laughter) so yeah I’m hoping that’s going to happen but we’ll have to wait and see.”
This suggests that Donegan’s strategy will be keeping the work and innovation her companies can achieve at a high level for two or three years more before the benefits can be felt by Virtual Reality Ireland and their contemporaries.
Niall Campion
“The more people who have experience with the headsets, the more people there are to use our software. An increase in hardware uptake is only a good thing for the market.’’
Campion doesn’t really answer the question unfortunately, although he does sound positive about the figures and doesn’t deny their authority.
4.3 Discussion
- This research found that despite there being no empirical reason to doubt the figures, companies in the VR/AR/XR industry in Ireland are generally not convinced by the high figures predicted for the future of this market.
- The success of the industry is accepted as inevitable by the interviewees. However, the success of the industry doesn’t necessarily mean success for all of the companies involved.
- Competition in the VR/AR/XR marketplace is encouraged, however the growing startup economy has to be seen as supportive in order for the sector to appear attractive to new companies. Therefore a display of the mutual support and potential success of each company has to be a big part of every brand’s message.
- Contrary to this, however, is the fact that having fewer personnel is a factor that creates a barrier of entry to the industry, suggesting that new companies can only be formed by people who have already had the privilege of practical experience. This denotes that new companies can’t be formed from the bottom as cottage industries, meaning new businesses can only realistically be formed by people leaving the big multinational companies that have recently moved to Ireland.
- This implies that by accepting that the figures published in 2018 accurately predict the growth of this sector and also that in Ireland this increase in value will only be beneficial to the multinational companies, the cottage industry aesthetic that gave birth to VR that is currently being superseded by these corporations will be wiped out.
- The chances of being bought out by the multinationals is already quite low as a consequence of their limited engagement with smaller Irish companies. Attempts have been made to attract these companies to collaborate on projects, but unless the companies in the Irish sector are very specialised, especially in altruistic projects, their chances of becoming a major brand decrease even further.
Concluding Thoughts on the Contribution of this Research, its Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research
5.1 Implications of Findings for the Research Questions
The outcomes of the research show that the predicted figures released in 2018 are very likely to be accurate for industry leaders. Unfortunately this means the smaller Irish companies are less likely to benefit. Their responses to the questions suggest that despite their understanding of the stock markets work, industry insiders realise that this is another factor driving the need to specialise, build strong communities in the sector and keep a strong, public facing image in order to stay afloat.
The companies are positive for their futures but the lack of certainty in what changes will happen and when. This means they have to keep creating projects that engage an audience. By exploring the function of altruism in brand management I am confident that I have shown not only the benefits of continuing the model of responsible VR management recommended by Lanier; “We have wonderful systems to work with. If we don’t dismiss the value left to us by every preceding generation, we can build a dignified, sustainable, very high-tech society that becomes the launching pad for adventures we can’t yet imagine, but we engineers might have to learn a little humility to get there.” (Lanier, 2018, 640)
5.2 Contributions and Limitations of the Research
If I had more time I would have tried to infiltrate the multinationals that have chosen Ireland as their European headquarters such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Although it would have been hard to get access to anyone in management at these companies it would have been beneficial to hear the official responses to requests for access with regard to the smaller Irish tech companies. I was told by a number of the interviewees that Google and Microsoft are more likely to grant access than Apple, so I could have explored how open to communication these companies are.
I would also have liked to visit conferences and meetups, as I feel that by experiencing the way TechIreland and Eirmersive differed I could have expanded this aspect of my research, discovering more about the way Irish tech companies, big and small, interact and collaborate with each other.
5.3 Recommendations for Future Research
The industry is positioned to change massively over the next 3-5 years, so there is a lot of research that can be made about small tech companies in Ireland who have chosen VR/AR/XR as their practice. This is made even more interesting by the fact that there are a lot of very unpredictable changes that will have massive consequences for the industry, such as Brexit. Also seeing as some bigger companies such as Apple are being quite secretive about their future plans in the Irish sector, there are plenty of studies that can follow on from this one and create completely original content.
5.4 Final Conclusion and Reflections
The sector is strong and growing. The predicted international figures are high but this doesn’t guarantee that all companies will be successful. Continuing adaption and collaboration are what makes a strong local economy, so even if there are multinationals making most of the important decisions, the smaller VR/AR/XR companies in Ireland have competitive skill sets that should guarantee they will specialise and find a place in the market.
The results indicate that market prediction information published by large private companies who don’t acknowledge how they arrive at their data isn’t considered accurate by four of the six people interviewed. Through discussing the data there is less focus on the accuracy and more about whether the data has either been tampered with or based on bad machine learning inputs. This could be a result of the data being generated for investors rather than industry insiders. The target audience who will take action when seeing these figures will be the people who have disposable income to invest in these markets rather than VR/AR/XR industry insiders.
The interviewees are right to suggest that the people who would benefit from a sharp rise in the market would be the multinational companies. These corporations have VR, AR and XR subdivisions, so their investment in these disciplines are less of a risk. The smaller companies who I researched can utilize this projected rise in the market value by continuing to build a well integrated professional community. More time and money should be invested in initiatives like Eirmersive and strategies should be undertaken to ensure they have a strong branding presence As the market is built on a foundation of altruistic principles outlined by Lanier (2017), a suggestion that would increase the chances of the Irish companies being continually successful when the market is set to rise could be to encourage more public events for the general public, as well as outreach programmes to allow the technology to reach the people who need it most.
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Appendices
Appendix A – Niall Campion
1, Not yet essential but growing.
2, Over 40% of their revenue comes from the UK. Lots of the companies who are successful have a portion of export but not a big enough market in Ireland over 50% of our revenue comes from export and 30-40% comes from the UK, Brexit is a concern for sure with
The value of sterling going down means it’s harder for us to become competitive with UK companies. There are also fears regarding trade barriers will be a problem that we’re trying to mitigate against. Yes, Brexit has potential to have a negative impact on our growth.
3, 3:20
Our business is purely based on VR and AR technology we’re always looking for the next technology so for example we’re involved in a five year accelerated rate of growth...
It definitely does in the good way over the last 6 months the Oculus Quest has reopened quite a lot of doors the marketing for quest has made a lot of people aware of the technology. Oculus’ figures themselves would suggest they can’t keep the Quest in stock it’s exceeding their predictions of how much it can sell.
The more people who have experience with the headsets, the more people who access to the headsets the more people there are to use our software. An increase in hardware uptake is only a good thing for us.
4
We would always like to see ourselves as at the leading edge in the grand scheme of things we’re probably not that big a company at the moment, we have 9 employees today we’re adding another 4 over the next month so in terms of VR training in ireland or VR for enterprise in ireland we're probably one of the bigger companies there’s maybe 2 or 3
definitely one bigger than us maybe one around the same size
Internationally there are companies of up to 300 people making VR training content but what we think we do uniquely is we have a different approach to how we make the product for example we use a lot of video content as well as a lot of interactive content, so were always looking at what other technology we can bring in so we wouldn’t define ourselves as just a VR and AR company it’s more about using the smartest technologies to train in an efficient way.
5, we started off doing one and we’ve found another. Initially we started off for brands and organisations using it as a marketing tool, so as a way of giving consumers another way to interact or engage with their brands a personalised way
So that the VR that you do it is like a personal experience and really a personalised experience, so that’s really powerful in a marketing context.
A phrase I have always used is
They don’t remember what you say or do, they remember how you make them feel My background is in film making and when I came to VR the power VR brings over traditional film making is immeasurable, in order to make people feel things. You can make people feel close to things that you can’t even come close to in traditional film making. I’m not saying there isn’t value in traditional film making but for brands trying to engage people in new and exciting ways VR is a great technology for that.
But then the other thing that we do is we have seen a niche in training. So in the same way as you can have a personal experience with a brand you can also experience situations that you couldn't traditionally do if you’re reproducing the real world is quite an expensive and potentially a dangerous thing to do.
So I guess for training requirements that would be hazardous or expensive they would be able to make them virtually.
6, There are a couple of different benefits, one is that it’s safer. We did a project in Somalia around IED detection so IEDs are unexploded bombs so you don’t want to be trying to detect real bombs when you’re training because it’s literally a life or death situation. Even trying to do simulated bombs can be difficult.
And then because it’s a remote situation, so you’re going out into the field in Somalia which in itself is dangerous so we can simulate what it’s like to be out in the field without even having to leave your home country so for troops who are deployed to Somalia from Ethiopia or Uganda or Kenya they can practice at home. Before they even reach Somalia they will know what it looks and feels like before they get there. SO that’s the safety benefit obviously.
But there’s also a cost benefit so in certain scenarios to train for it can be quite expensive so if you have to do a complex scenario involving multiple actors in VR you can recreate that once with all your actors and then train in it as many times as you want. So literally every time you train in it you’re saving yourself money.
So they are the two main benefits but because it's such early days for the technology it can be hard to roll out. So if people instinctively feel that they are doing better but the long term studies aren’t there yet to prove those benefits.
7,
We’re quite client focused always so what we produce has been client driven. We didn’t come to Somalia with a hard proposal but said this is the technology you could use and they defined what the scenario was and that would generally be the way we work we don’t believe in making stuff that we think is good we’ll add our creativity to the problem that the client presents us with. That’s where we always start is with what problem are we trying to resolve? What’s the end result that we’re trying to achieve?
We want to make stuff for the client/customer that will appeal to as many people as possible.
Some people make the mistake of thinking that they know better than the customer but for me the customer always knows best.
8,
100% B2B.
We always test everything we do. Sometimes they sell to the business and the business sells the product to consumers. We did a project with Samsung for example, which was an AR application and we made sure that we tested that so it was an 8 week delivery so I think we tested every second week or every third week just to make sure that people were able to use the application. Because us as developers, we know things intuitively but people who have never used the technology before might struggle with some of the new gestures or the new visual language that AR brings. So the big ones that people were struggling with was trying to keep all the products 1 to 1 scale so they didn’t have the ability to zoom in or out so if people wanted to get close to the product they have to actually move the device, in this case the viewer was generally a phone… closer to the device… and so people were struggling with that we found that from people with testing so we added a new functionality that instead of having to pinch it to zoom in you could click on it and bring it closer to your position so if you don’t want to move the device you can move the actual 3D object closer to you.
You can never assume what people are going to do so you always have to test. Because you’ll find people do very strange things all of the time!
9, We’ve just completed a program with Google “adopt a startup”. They give you mentorship as a startup they guide you and tell you how to scale your business so they are very active in trying to activate the tech community inside their own walls. Facebook have been doing something broadly similar, they run a lecture series which is more elective as opposed to an interactive programme.
Apple headquarters in Cork and we personally have had no dealings with Apple in spite of trying a few times to get in contact with them. They just don’t seem that interested in dealing with the developer community in ireland specifically. It seems that if you’re dealing with developers you’re dealing with people on support who you can talk to but there’s not much engagement with the local community.
Whereas someone like Google seem very active in engaging with the local community. Aside from the companies themselves looking to engage with other companies I guess what you also have is a lot of employees. So Google employees i think is 6000 or 9000 people
As those people leave Google and set up their own companies and this fosters an entrepreneur culture in the city.
I guess it’s two things, the companies actually offering support and then also staff members looking to set up on their own with their own ideas instead of setting up in some other country they can set up in Ireland where there is a lot of government support to start new companies.
10, We don’t specifically target Irish companies there’s already a danger of the market becoming oversaturated over here
….it’s taken a long time for those sorts of companies to become institutionalised.
I don’t see it becoming a mainstream tool for 3-5 years
It’s still a high value thing. Until the means of production becomes cheaper At the level we’re at the market has already close to oversaturation as the pace of adoption is slow. Ireland’s focus has always been in export, it is a small country so there’s only a certain number of companies with the budget and willingness to engage with new technologies. I don’t think we could survive as a company if we were only trying to sell to Ireland.
Appendix B – Camille Donegan
1,
1:50
No, it’s not essential unfortunately, not yet. I’ll expand on that a bit I suppose...
I think the use cases for virtual reality are still being defined and most organisations in Ireland are only waking up to the value proposition that’s presented by new technologies.
2,
2:37
It’s a good question and one that we don’t have the answers to yet, really and that’s across every sector, not just this sector, because we still don’t know what's going to happen regarding the backstop and until we know what the agreement is going to look like it’s very hard to know how it’s going to affect trade.
There’s quite a good relationship in the VR community in Ireland and the UK, we’ve had some trade missions last year which Tom and Alex were also a part of, I’m sure that they both mentioned to you that we’re setting up Eirmersive, an umbrella organisation for the industry in Ireland (Eirmersive.com) so we have travelled to the UK and we have good relationships there so sometimes for instance we will be contacted by our counterparts in the UK saying “we’re too busy can you help us with this project?” Or “we need some 360 video footage of somewhere in Ireland are you OK to go and film it?” so we have good working relationships on the ground with people in the UK so I see that that will continue and I don’t think any border will change that, bar maybe some change to VAT rates that we invoice to each other based upon… but I think the relationships are already defined. In terms of say ourselves looking at opening a UK office I will be reluctant to do that until Brexit has passed and we absolutely know the tax and legal implications of the new structures so it would prevent me from opening in the UK until that’s all finalised. I’m sure lots of business people are the same. It has anecdotally… I’ve met people at conferences that have moved their business to Ireland so I’d like to think that it poses an opportunity for VR and AR companies in Ireland if the amount of businesses coming here or UK businesses are opening a branch in Ireland because it’s the easiest EU country for them to be based in because we speak the same language and we’re neighbours.
We’ve always been neighbours but we’ve had a chequered past for the most part over our history, so I think that could really present a positive opportunity for + and therefore we’ll be looking for their VR and AR solutions on the ground here in Ireland, from providers here.
3,
6:02
Not really! I think that anyone whos in this industry knows that we’ve been tarnished by smoke and mirror campaigns online so people all saw an augmented reality saw a whale jumping ahead of the sports hall and went “Woh, clearly that’s possible” and augmented reality, while it’s amazing, it only really works on a much smaller scale activation. So yeah you might have a whale jumping out of something but it’s only going to be the coffee cup on your table. So in terms of market predictions I personally take them with a grain of salt. Most of the research that I’ve read looked more closely at Ireland were suggesting that the appetite to buy here is two to three years away, for being pretty ubiquitous where every company would be very interested in having an immersive technology focus and that they are there in terms of digital transformation they’re looking at those technologies. For whatever reason Ireland can be quite slow to adopt new technologies. In some sectors in particular if you look at our tourism sector, a lot of tourism sites don’t even have a good website, let alone an app, let alone being ready to do AR and VR. That said, I’ve had conversations with some brands and some potential clients who say “We’re actually just going to skip even doing a website and doing an app and we’re gonna cut straight to the chase to connect with millenials and we’re going to do some sort of virtual reality or augmented reality activation” and I’m like “Brilliant, great, let’s do it!” Because in a way if you don’t have a website now it’s too late. How useful are they now? They only appeal to a particular demographic or business usually.
So, market predictions, for me it’s much more wait and see, I don’t think the market predictions reflect the appetite to buy or the adoption in Ireland. Unfortunately if you look what’s happening in the UK and how far ahead they are in the immersive technology sector in terms of the amount of work that has been produced and the return on investment they are seeing, we’re way behind and that’s primarily because in 2014 the UK saw what was coming and they multiplied by 9 the amount of investment they were putting into immersive technology. So they saw what was coming, they invested very heavily in it and it’s really paid off for them… and I can send you on some research on the UK because they’re also really good at publishing their research and talking about it and when I go to conferences in the US there’s a lot of talk about how “...the UK are the European leaders in immersive technology aren’t they?”... Well… probably! There’s really established companies that are doing really well and are working commercially. That said, when you talk to them, as I said when you have relationships with people on the ground, sometimes you have conversations where they’re frustrated too and they might go two three months without a project that’s worth speaking about and that’s tricky so it’s hard for every company no matter where you are in the world to be sustainable at this point and my predictions are that in two or three years that will shift and then the money’s going to flow in and we’re all gonna be multimillionaires so yeah I’m hoping that’s going to happen but we’ll have to wait and see.
Also to say about the adaption of headsets, like, again the market predictions, I’d like to really know what they are based on because everyone in the industry doesn’t even know what announcements are coming so there’s a lot of anticipation about Apple and that they are possibly going to announce AR glasses soon and they’re going to blow everything outside of the water will it happen we don’t know but if it does happen that could multiply by 10 the AR predictions in terms of adoption and you know the related economic impact of that and in terms of VR headsets the quest has just come out which is an absolute game changer all VR companies are just delighted to have this stand alone 6 degrees of freedom headset that’s really been excellently produced and it just makes life so much easier for everyone so we’ll see what happens.
4,
11:22
It’s an interesting question and one I think about daily. So we are a big strapped VR content company, we’ve been in existence for about 4 years and we’re very early adapters which is good and bad. We’re known in Ireland for being quite dynamic and prolific so we produce a lot of content and we do that quite quickly so we’ve had over a dozen projects in the last year, 2 of which won awards and we push ourselves very hard when we’re working on a project and several of those projects have been the first of their kind so as far as we know for example we recently did a fjkdlsja project for zombiebus.ie so when people are around this zombie bus, how do you have loads of zombies coming onto the bus every show? That’s not going to be cost effective for the tourism company so we worked with them to create a 360 video experience that is delivered on oculus go headsets so they’re on the bus and there’s some characters and actors on there, a scientist and a soldier and then at one point they said “OK, everyone put on your gas masks, the zombies are coming!” and in the gas masks is the oculus go headset, they put it on, they see the same scenes, so they see the bus that they’re actually on because it’s filmed in the real bus and so it maps to what they expect to see except then zombies start to come in and start eating people and stuff like that… So I think we’re really well placed to do some interesting work that’s not necessarily run of the mill VR training, hazard safety, virtual tours, those kind of standard use cases; they don’t really interest me to be totally honest, I’m much more interested in pushing boundaries and seeing where the arts can link in with immersive technologies, how artists can elevate the possibilities of combining live theatre with 360 video or augmented reality and projection mapping those kind of projects are really interesting to me and we have partners who are also keen to explore those possibilities.
So I guess pushing boundaries and really focusing on that intersection between art and tech is what I’d say to that.
5,
14:55
For brands, mainly for marketing? It really depends, what’s great about being so general as a production company so we work in the AV sector we have the domain name for truereality.ie and VR.ie and we get a lot of traction just through our website and also through our networks and our reputation but it means that we get really interesting enquiries from a really broad spectrum of clients. So for instance yesterday I was talking with a major drinks brand and they know they want to do some sort of AI VR activation but they don’t really know where to begin and for the first few months that I was here in virtual reality in Ireland we would meet clients all the time and we would show them some possibilities but we would really keep it very open and authoritative where we’ve realised that actually it seems to be a much deeper conversation really if you show four or five relevant use cases maybe ours or maybe from an international projects of people doing something really well that would apply to their brand or what they’re looking to do and then say “which one of these do you wanna do?” because otherwise the thinking is too big and you can’t decide on any proof of concept or possible solution so that’s been an interesting realisation.
We’re still at the stage where it’s quite a novelty factor so even today there were 3 enquiries from brands looking to do something at a conference or an event. So it’s really common use case to have some kind of Virtual or Augmented reality activation for your product or your brand at a stand at a conference so that kind of makes sense but you want to make that really good. You’ll get a queue no matter what with people walking away saying “well that was terrible” of “that was quite competent” or “that looked rubbish” then it’s not going to be positive for your brand so the novelty factor is one thing but you need to have some really strong content that ties in with the messaging and the brand. Then I think for the most part sometimes clients think or brands think “oh it’s just enough to put something out into the world and people will find a way to consume it”. We’re really not at that stage yet with VR and AR, we really find that you have to hold people’s hands with these activations and you really need a guided experience and most people still haven’t tried a headset and if they have it’s probably a roller coaster. I’m not a fan of showing people roller coasters because they’re going to get sick then they won’t come back for more. But most people have tried very few VR experiences or even interacted with many AR installations so we just go through the brand with what’s possible and take it from there.
6, 19:52
I’ve got some interesting stories to share in that regard, for example the project we did for FBD training which won an ILITD award. It’s a concept where you sit into the perspective of an expert so you put on the headset and you’re looking through the eyes of a person, it’s a disembodied experience, you look down and you see hands and you see clothes and you’re sitting on a desk in a busy call centre environment in FBD. In the first iteration we did of that, we showed it to the client on the website and he felt nauseous, he felt he had motion sickness and he took off the headset and that was because the first iteration was stereoscopic so it was 3D. 3D stereoscopy is quite interesting actually, first of all, there’s a large percentage of people who can’t perceive 3Dness, which is really interesting and some people don’t even know it until they try virtual reality and it just feels really off to them. There’s also another thing, basically we all have a very different interpupillary distance so your eyes will have a slightly different distance of your pupils distance to me so if we both put on the same headset and we’re both looking at standard 3D rendering of content, you could perceive it perfectly and it will look really great for you and then I put on the headset and I don’t have an optimal experience and the 3D is slightly off for my eyes and that can make me feel ill. So on the higher end headsets, the 360 degrees of freedom headsets you actually have a little tab, a device on the headset where you can change the interpupillary distance. However if it’s 360 video rendered content, it’s going to have standard 3D, so you might still have issues but you can still fix the lenses on the hardware with the toggle.
So that feedback was really interesting, we’ve taken it upwards and for most VR training projects where we’re working with film, live action, we actually roll out with monoscopic format so as not to have any issues with eye strain or motion sickness. That was an interesting finding and feedback loop. Really, that same project has been the best teacher because that was quite early and for a VR training solution the first iteration was in 2016 and the client told us what was needed and how useful it was and we thought, well this was a cool concept, we should try this but we didn’t realise how useful it would be for the trainers. So they lean really heavily on this solution all the time in the training room they say that people actually come up to them once they have progressed to the call centre and actively ask to use it again “can I check the VR experience again? I just want to check how that call centre agent got over those objections around price” for example. So they’ve told us how useful it is.
Then it really can be different say, from a VR project that we created for Hamilton and Leechram. We created what we thought was the coolest game ever. It was an AR experience that makes an escape room, you find objects and they get scanned and that triggers the next part of the story and you’re basically meeting this ghost and then you’re banishing him… spoiler!... but in that project, when we went to launch it actually turned out that the site didn’t have the resources to have a games master on site all the time so that was a learning (curve) for us we created something that we thought was a really great solution, which it is but if it doesn’t work for the client’s needs or where they’re at in terms of their resources then it’s not the fit necessarily so we actually created a second project for them that they could utilise straight away where we used the same live action footage from the app and we bring posters to life, so that was a workaround that we had for that particular client.
7, 25:10
Really, 90% of the content we’ve created has been bespoke for clients fulfilling a very specific need, want or desire. However we do have a product that is a B2B product called “dreams away”. It’s a meditation app and with that product the viewer can be in their stressful office and then they step into the meeting room and put on the headset and they’re transported into a beautiful place in Ireland like Glen da Loch or Hilla Tara and they can choose what kind of voice over or meditation they might like to combine with the footage so that’s been an interesting journey we have a viable product that’s being tested at the moment and we’ll be launching it next year. So were doing market analysis for that and we can see the appetite to buy it’s an interesting journey and we’re finding that there’s a lot of interest for that kind of use case in corporates. We haven’t created any consumer based products in fact we specifically don’t create consumer geared products at this point, the meditation app probably will have a consumer download but that’s further down the road for that product. So yeah, B2B is our focus and that can be creative bespoke content for clients or it can be curating existing content, so we have partnerships with a couple of hospitals and we’ve provided content that can help patients say with reminiscence for example where they can use Google Earth and they can go to their favourite place in Florence virtually, albeit that they’re tied to the hospital for whatever reason.
8, 28:03
Well I can tell you why we’re not yet looking at the consumer market and that’s initially because the number of headsets a very successful game company we know was looking very specifically for a market and their findings are basically that there isn’t enough headsets out there yet to really be successful enough to get the return on investment that you need to make it commercially viable so we’re all waiting I think for there to be enough headsets really. Like what I said earlier there still a lot of people who have tried virtual reality so we know the people with headsets are all “techy boys and techy girls” in the 23 to 35 age group and there’s a particular kind of thing that they want. “Beat Sabre” is the number 1 game, everybody loves Beat Sabre, it’s brilliant so unless we create the next Beat Sabre you’re not really going to make serious money in the consumer market. Because it’s such early days people really need to go somewhere to experience virtual reality so we’re still looking at location based activation for brand promotion, for marketing, even for training, so at trade shows we’d show the viewer training solutions and that’s how we get most of our business, by showing people examples of our work.
9, 30:11
What we’re finding at the moment and we’re hopeful this will change is that there is not a massive engagement between the multinationals and the community or fjdhfdjksa. There’s some activations but it’s limited so we’re really looking to have a much deeper and more involved relationship with multinationals and see where that can go immersive are particularly going to be looking at that closely and looking to build relationships there so that will mean that we can support one another in terms of these emerging markets. Obviously it makes sense for facebook, soon they might have facebook reality labs I hope in Cork in Ireland so to connect and have ongoing relationships with them would be the top of their virtual reality agenda. That said, Google have helped me with a couple of events when I needed headsets and I was looking for people to bring Temprush to a dance festival so that artists could try VR they helped me with that. So if you have a contact and a specific ask usually they’ll help but I think we can build on that and progress it a lot more in the future.
10, 32:24
So in terms of the business use cases some people use it for inductions some people use it for a virtual tour or so people can see how to navigate their office or see what their colleagues’ offices are like for example so they’re quite good use cases, but mostly VR is used for training and AR
So with AR most cases I’ve seen have been industry so for an electrical supply system for example you might use some sort of smart glasses or helmet or your ipad to see what needs to connect to what or how you can debulb or troubleshoot a device and also have some sort of remote view and so Dackary have a really good offering that enables that for enterprise. And then for virtual reality we look at training so that can be technical skills training we created a project for Woody’s where their staff learned to plumb, how to fix a burst pipe, how to fix a toilet, how to fit a garden tap in virtual reality and the neuroscience shows that the brain actually thinks that they’re doing that activity because it’s a spacial environment and it’s very very powerful on the brain so it basically lights up the part of your brain linked to doing the activity not just seeing it as you would in a TV, a video for example.
So I’ve just described some examples of really successful use cases that are happening now, so any company can do that right now, like the one I said with the call centre project where you can embody the expert and that expert can be doing anything. We used film for that because we realised that if you have computer avatars dotted about the place you don’t take it as seriously so for hazardous situations or those kind of environments it would have to be computer generated so it depends on the use case. But there are really tangible use cases that can be activated right now by any company no matter what sector they are in and it’s just really us as providers letting companies know that and really just being very specific about what you can do.
Because you can talk about the possibilities for years and go nowhere.
So really honed use cases for what’s possible now and looking a little bit to the future in terms of road map but as I say, we don’t know. If Apple release VR glasses next month that’s going to change any road map that you might have so it’s a very exciting space to be in but it’s incredibly dynamic and ever changing.
Some people talk about a time when everybody goes home and puts a headset on their head… Most of us in the industry don’t ever want that to happen, that’s not why we’re in it, we don’t want people to put on a headset for 5 hours and not connect with the real world.
When we get to really heavy consumer adoption it needs to be specific use cases so we ask people who use it for entertainment, but…
With businesses it’s always going to be a very specific use case and then creating the best solution to focus on that need or problem then the nature of how that's executed will improve over time but it always needs to come back to a business need, and once the focus is on that I don’t think we’ll ever be saturated. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of stuff that will be created that just won’t stick because people don’t need it so once you’re addressing a need especially in business I think making the best solution you can with those tools and the resolution of content and the interactive possibilities and the platforms and how the mechanics of the solutions will all evolve and become better. So I know the content I’ve produced in the last year well I’m proud of it now but in two years time it’s going to be old fashioned and the resolution will be low compared to what’s available in 2 year’s time but that’s fine, you expect that, you don’t expect what you create today to last more than a couple of years.
Appendix C – James Corbett
1, no I wouldn’t say it’s essential at this stage at all
2, there are two different questions really in terms of sales of headsets to Irish companies and what companies are we interested in. It’s still very early days in the adoption of this technology. There’s been a lot of tyre kicking over the last few years Lots of companies ask us to make things for free and don’t want to pay for something but that’s starting to change as the technology offers a real return to companies. There hasn’t been much adoption in Irish enterprise of this technology that I’ve been aware of.
Nobody knows what Brexit is going to be so I can only talk of one example. Were working for a Japanese pharmaceutical who have three manufacturing locations in ireland so they are starting to adopt
We did a feasibility model for them to see if it was a good time to adopt this technology, can it offer a real return on investment?
We’re very happy to say they’re going ahead with at least two projects I don’t think they even see them as pilot projects but the start of adopting VR technology. If a company is big enough and they have deep enough pockets they see that it’s ready for adoption and use now.
3, You know, we’ve been hearing so much about forecasts over the last 6 years I don’t really pay too much attention to them but in general terms the sense we’re getting on the ground is there is more reason to be confident. That’s a combination of things, the conversations were having about the belief in the technology
Not among tech people like ourselves but people doing other things and other industries and businesses they understand that this technology is something that can be useful and do good in their business
That’s more interesting to us then other types of forecast
But also seeing a new headset coming along like the Oculus rift headsets
For me this is a massive inflection point
You’ve got to think about consumer VR vs enterprise VR but in a lot of cases enterprise
VR is consumer VR as it’s the same kind of headset that they will adopt
So I do think that the quest is a huge leap forward in terms of cost and capability to have the 6 degrees of freedom on a mobile port and headset it offers a lot of potential for the things we can do with that even with a pharmacutical
This is where VR and AR takes off
4, We’re still trying to figure out our position we started off as a software development studio, we had a product we had developed for release in 2013, wihch was way too early so that didn’t really work out so we became an AR/VR development company
Consultancy is where our business is at the moment
Pharmaceutical company
There will be some situations where we will put our hat in the ring further afield
We will be bringing in
The best of the best to build products for our clients in the enterprise sector
5, I have to keep bringing up this case of this pharmaceutical because its our best example, we dont’ want to generalise but it’s our best customer so its the best knowledge we can draw on. so in that case it has been interesting I may have naively gone knocking on their door a year ago saying we’re an AR/VR company and we think we can make a training application for you, they would have closed the door in our face. As a consultancy we have developed a different approach and that is to go there with a very open view to building a mutual relationship that starts out with education. They had one problem to start with and thought that AR/VR could help them with, that was the start of the conversation but then but the first meeting was with their top management and some of their top IT people. Very quickly the conversation widened out to what the technology was and what it could do. They had ideas about what the technology could do and couldn’t do and they were fairly right and also fairly wrong. So the next thing we did for them in terms of the engagement was an education experience an internal seminar for them so that was a day of presentations and videos but also putting a variety of headsets on them, using VR and AR headsets and giving them a real taste the capabilities and limitations of the technology. That was really quite an eye opening experience and we discovered a very good thing to do because they had a much better understanding after that.
So we started hearing back from people who had ideas of how it could be applied within the manufacturing premises. So we did a feasibility study.
Through a feasibility study with them and that was where we had somebody embedded in the company for 6 weeks doing interviews with all the top staff, with all the top management as many staff as possible. But also shadowing it wasn’t just taking their word for the way things work in their.. company making sure the information they were telling us was right
We thought that AR/VR could have made some sense here but in practice we can see now that it's not going to work and it could never going to be adopted
On the other hand we saw places where we never dreamed AR and VR might be applied and could make sense so we wrote up a feasibility report based on our experiences with 5 proposals in terms of practical applications for AR and I'm glad to say they came back to us and said yes we want to progress we’ll start with two perhaps and they’re actually quite interested in the other 3 as well.
That has been an interesting process. One of the key things they said in the very first meeting any IT project for them is a change management process more so than an IT project, it’s about any piece of technology into the company the people have to want to use it. If people can’t see how it’s making their job easier or if they think the technology could replace their job that’s also an issue
6, actually even though in terms of technology maturity AR is lagging behind VR, we all have our own views about how that will evolve maybe AR will catch up. maybe they will converge onto a single headset there is so much overlapping in terms of technology already.
From that point of view we thought that VR is where we would start but in this manufacturing scenario even though implementation, one of the projects will be VR that’s specifically training they are also interested in doing VR tours. in the manufacturing situation AR is a primary interest really. It depends of course on what you call AR so really the most interesting thing and the most practical isn’t really AR it’s remote assistance so like a glorified skype call with an AR headset though, the hands free experience is what is most important. They can bring in an expert from wherever in the world to help with a problem they have with a piece of equipment call that what you want but obviously that could be augmented as well dependant on what software platform you’re using, it can start off as a skype call, but then experts can start annotating the operator’s, (the technician’s) environment drawing over it with products like the PTC euphoria chalk or many other off the shelf augmented reality suites you’ll see that ability for the remote expert to annotate over the piece of equipment and that can be pinned to the environment if you are wearing a true AR headset so you start of the basic application the remote assistant and you start adding layers on to that then the AR annotation and then the standard operating procedures is a big one as well that’s something that we will probably be able to work on quite soon where guys are working on a piece of equipment and they can pop up a recorded piece of video or imagery or instructions that can help them on the specific piece of operation that they need to do.
7,
17:50 We haven’t actually produced a lot of content ourselves so this has been mainly consultancy engagement it might be the case that we can develop some kind of virtual reality training for them or VR tours for them but also we have to be quite neutral and objective and if we think that another development studio, maybe a competitor of ours can do a better job we have to tell the client that because the client comes first we have to do the best by them.
19:00
We thought when we started out a few years ago that we were going to productise and bring a specific product to market and then we stepped back from that and decided to be more of a bespoke outsourced software developer.
Always with a view to eventually when we found the niche or maybe specific thing that thought would make an awful lot of sense for an awful lot more people that we could productise that and I think we might find that kind of an application as we go through this process with this pharmaceutical or with more customers like them where we find common denominators, things that we see across a lot of companies that seems oh we have this sort of problem and this is a very specific niche maybe in pharmaceutical That we can fill and build this specific type of app and productise it and bring it market That’s down the line I’d like to do that. Thats where you can really scale up a company and grow a company is by productising it instead of being a consultancy
8,
21:19
Unfortunately no I can’t give you a good answer, it’s been so hard to get customers it's been really tough to keep this company going. if we were in Silicon Valley or London or someplace it might have been easier to get customers so we built a lot of prototypes over the years and then potential customers didn't think it was worth investing any further so we wasted a lot of time doing that kind of thing. so I don't have a lot of experience to draw on it was nothing much consumer facing so we would have built stuff for bigger companies utilities and so on and they would have been training applications but we didn’t every really get to the stage where I could give you a good answer on that really.
9
23:21 That’s an interesting question from the point of view that were starting up this new group called Eiremersive
We’d love to get results from your studies because we want to try and engage on a broader level with these larger companies.
We’re going to have membership
We’re going to find out what do they want. To be members what should we be doing as a representative body?
Were shamelessly copy to some degree Immerse UK which has been a very successful representative body in London it’s a different kettle of fish there because they’re funded
by the government on some levels whereas we won’t be as yet anyway
So we want to engage more with the likes of Google
Also Occulus have an emerging base here now because they bought that company called infiniled in Cork
Logitech are doing VR stuff here and there’s some quite interesting stuff in terms of VR going on here but iI think a lot of it’s under the radar as yet and we want to make sure we’re more fully aware and start engaging with these people so again it’s a bit early yet to say we’ve not really built up
I run this event it’s a VR meetup called 3D camp Dublin and Irish VR and we have had the likes of Google came along some of their people came along a few times. Dackery the headset makers they have come along they're good supporters
So they come along and we have kind of personal relationships with them but I think to put it on a more formal footing for the industry is the challenge.
10
26:05
Yes I think it is, I may have given you the same answer for the last five years but genuinely I realise I would have been naive to have given you that answer 2 years ago, because we were too enthusiastic. When you have something like the Oculus Quest which is genuinely a breakthrough device. Depending on what you want to do from here on in it just gets better
And it’s not just the Oculus Quest you have the HV reverb depending on what you want to do you've got the six dot portable headsets
HP reverb , you’ve got a headset now for almost anything the really high resolution headsets
AR is really catching on too and I have no doubt that apple are going to do something really big and interesting in AR really soon in the next year or two. I think it’s a bit like...
I was around for the start of the web I was building websites in 1995 which feels like a similar time, it was still hard to prove that the web was worth people's time and worth the money I built the website for my first company and I had to tell them what the web was and had to convince them it was worth building a website to market themselves
It feels like a similar time
It feels like the equivalent of what was happening in 99 where it was obvious that you needed a website people were copping onto it at that stage
There are so many parallels there i know we’re talking about a software platform vs a hardware platform but obviously the software is a key part of it too,
But that feels like where we’re at it feels like we're 94 95 maybe 96 in terms of web and it’s going to look very obvious in a few years time. That you will be late if you don’t have a 3D spatial web strategy let's think about the 3D web that’s where we’re focused now
3D web, the spacial web is where it's going to be at
It’s slow obviously but once that takes off that’s when it will really start to happen
Oversaturated in the same way that the web became oversaturated, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I left my last “proper job” in the year 99 and I decided that I was going to be a web developer and that was in the days when you could just write html so you didn’t have to be a good designer or didn’t have to be a good programmer to create web pages. I was neither a designer nor was I a programmer, but within a few years in 2002-2003 it was very hard to be a lone developer because you were coming up against really good designers but you’re also coming up against a lot more cowboys, hot shots, young fellas! Every young guy who knew a lot about websites was building them and fair play to them.
So in that sense it all became a bit oversaturated that whole web development thing. Nowadays there’s a very good business for a certain amount of really good web development companies but yeah that became totally oversaturated and the same thing will happen with AR and VR but that's a good sign of a healthy market isn’t it?
Appendix D – Alex Gibson
1,
So you’re just talking about Virtual Reality, yes? (No both virtual and augmented reality as most people I spoke to consider them a single market in Ireland) Yeah probably if you are going to consider them as immersive technology it’s the term that’s used to describe the two combined along with mixed reality.
So yes so immersive is it an essential tool? Well it’s a tough question to answer in the sense that, I think that in many instances it can be proved to show efficiency and effective as gains for companies but whether companies see it as essential is the more debatable point. I think it is likely that it would be seen as an essential tool in the next 5 to 10 year horizon probably but at the moment it’s not seen as an essential tool. I think that would be how I would characterise my answer.
2,
Well the AR/VR market is quite small in Ireland in terms of number of companies you have probably been directed already to the tech Ireland website because that gives you pretty much a full picture of all the companies that are in the space and also different types of virtual markets that they serve so...
I think it’s in a very slow expansion still and I think that in the Republic of Ireland in particular it’s finding it difficult to access proper funding and government support so that’s causing it to be a little bit more slow in its expansion compared to the UK for example. I think that there are a number of large companies who have innovation centres who are certainly actively looking at proof of concept or concept testing using AR and VR it should be distinguished between that and full deployment of the technology in terms of an ongoing rollout in their company. I’m not aware of any companies to be honest who actually are using it on an integral basis throughout their organisation but certainly there are some good examples where companies are testing using it particularly as I said in innovation labs. But it’s been slow I think it’s fair to say and you are probably talking about 10 companies at the very most who have AR/VR at the core of what they do where that’s 50% plus of their revenue I’m guessing it’s less than 10 such companies in the whole country. I think this will change as the technology adoption rate globally increases as we see more of the barriers to the adoption reduced some of those barriers being economic obviously, some being I guess the current lack of information in terms of user case studies so people in organisations they don’t have enough concrete information about how this technology can make them more efficient or effective in their own particular business sector so that’s another barrier as those barriers over time reduce as the formal and factors become more uniform and the platforms such as the... where they are and we seem more commonly language for development of tools for example or applications it’s not about them the adoption will be… will grow… how quickly it’s a good question I don’t know is the short answer... and that’s a question that even the biggest experts globally don’t know... certainly looking back five years where the projections were 5 years ago, the industry has not expanded to the place where it was projected 5 or 6 years ago. However there are some technological changes evolving there’s a huge amount... an enormous amount of investment from the big 4 or 5 technology giants so the likelihood is the technology will evolve and there will be breakthroughs in this technology and that will lead to acceleration.
Brexit’s a hard one to answer directly. Certainly when I ran my conference over the last two years one of the things that I had been trying to do was get more UK companies to attend the conference and speak at the conference and fill up the conference and they’re totally talking to some companies in the UK there’s an interesting understanding of what’s happening in Ireland, maybe with you too with some presence in the Irish market as an access point of the European Union but there's nothing concrete happened in that regard, partly because I think in the UK the companies there there’s a very large domestic market the UK is further ahead than Ireland in terms of deployment those companies in the UK are preoccupied with building their domestic market and then it all makes sense in countries like Germany for example so it will probably be smaller countries like Ireland, Austria, Scandinavian countries that will seek to try and export the technology, their solutions etc. But in the short term I don’t see Brexit having a big impact as in I don’t think the market is big enough to warrant a lot of the UK using Ireland as a base at the moment and I did speak to a couple of companies in the UK and they’re quite busy in the UK it’s a big domestic market that’s their focus at the moment, so in the short term I don’t see it having any huge impact.
Camille Donovan. She has her own company, she’s CEO of a commercial company called Virtual Reality Ireland so she may have a different take. it’s good if you can catch her I know she does a lot of interviews good there's a large number of companies as you can imagine so yeah
3,
When you say that the projection is possible all of the projections that I see they vary but they are all positive...
Just the way you phrased the question I’d say that the projections are not possible. I think I’d have to say to you that projections for this sector in every country I see positive I think the question is how, certainly there maybe has been downward revision in that you should not confuse a reduction in the growth rate with a decline. The reality is that most projections are that this sector is definitely growing maybe not growing at the pace that was originally projected and you know it’s… I’m not a forecaster there are lots of forecasters who have skill sets but one thing that maybe I would ask you to reflect on when you’re writing up your thesis is that...
There has been an agenda, there’s an agenda for a lot of people to inflate the expectations around this market. You know not for people like me who work in the academic area there is no personal benefit, but you have to remember why are some of those forecasts so high? One of the reasons they are so high is there is a need from a lot of the companies for funding from investors so when you talk to companies, a lot of them are waiting for funds so when you have a sector like this you tend to give a lot of excessive inflation of the projections because of the financial issue because companies want to attract the interest of investors so they want to make this sector seem incredible “there’s no way I want to miss this opportunity” if I’m an investor, an angel fund VC... so I don’t know if anyone has mentioned that to you but to me that is a crucial factor and you look at these folk is why it has been so high in the past and why maybe now there is a bit more realism coming into the market because a lot of the investors who have invested in companies have found that the returns just haven’t happened yet. Many don’t by the way; but if they are generating revenue it’s certainly not at the levels that were anticipated. so I’m not giving you a projection and I’m not even giving you a commentary about whether they are right or wrong. I think common sense tells you because it’s an emerging technology that it will grow but the speed of that growth I think we need to be much more sanguine and conservative about and understand the agenda of why some of these projections have been put into the marketplace. because certainly the companies, it’s in their interests to report huge growth, huge interest, huge demand because for many of them their primary challenge at the moment isn’t about revenue, it isn’t about profit but it is about funding and they need to show that this is a huge sector.
4, 12:22
It’s a good question to give you the studios’ perspective on their studios. I suppose it depends a little bit in terms of who their virtual market are I guess I think that ultimately the vast wealth of interest and employment will be in the studios it won't be in the hardware sector, you know there will be less jobs, maybe Northern Ireland in that space because the hardware the glasses etc well most likely will remain China in most places so we’re in this huge employment problem how will they work but I think in the entertainment industry you will see the largest game studios for example for building their capacity and that, others may focus a little more on other work making projection I think that the studios is a term to describe the company really like Geoffrey how I know I think we will see more specialised studios with specialised skill sets and competencies for certain areas for example studios who focus just on training and maybe even virtual reality training for example and maybe even more specialised than that... you may see companies who specialise in virtual reality training for one market say healthcare for example maybe... but that’s a little bit in the distance at the moment these studios will take work opportunities from whoever has any business for anyone generally they’ll take it at the moment. As the market will grow and mature you’ll start to see the studio specialises a little bit and as they specialise the chances are I suspect they may be from far bigger studios bigger I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see some of the studios in the marketing area for example being part of the broader integrated communications agencies so people like WP Peeves the worlds biggest advertising agency even PR companies like eddleman … I would imagine we’ll see some of these companies getting the space and the way they make it into the space is by acquiring studios that have been building their profile over time that gives you an answer so that’s how I see it.
The other guys, did they think there would be more specialised studios? I don’t have the competitive dimension that other companies have to play with. The companies have all evolved out of other formats and have adapted into the VR market. They initially were asked to take on VR projects. They go across different markets because this market is so small.
5,
18:22
Ultimately the motivations are all the same they use any form of activation or communication tool I think in marketing in AR and VR has a huge opportunity to engage the customer across the decision process so AR and VR are very good tools for building awareness of products and they get a lot of media attention from a PR point of view. They are very good at helping people in the decision process you can actually have very simple level of brands you know like Ikea for visualisation they’re fantastic they can help people see what the product looks like in their own home for example or see what your clothes will look like on you, so it helps you navigate in terms of attitude or their motivation to buy a product or service. It can certainly create in terms of experiential branding where brands create VR experiences it’s really powerful in a world where it’s very difficult to connect with consumers, particularly youth audiences so a lot of brands now are looking actively at VR and AR experiential branding type stuff. I htink the piece of hte equation that probably hasn’t evolved yet but is of hte most interest to marketers is ultimately the commercial side. If you can move people away from getting intertested in saying “wow isn’t that cool” or I’ve never seen that before” “I’m enjoying the moment using this technology” to actually making a purchase. So that’s the next frontier, we are seeing the emergence of some quite specialised companies in hte Uk and hte US who are offering to make services to help monetise, for example selling advertising within in a virtual environment. Or allowing people in an AR context to; if they’re visualising something like clothing for example, to with the touch of the screen to actually make a purchase to connect it with an e commerce site for example.
One of the companies that has a huge interest in AR and VR actually is Amazon. I don’t know if you’ve been studying it but they have a developer toolkit called Sumerian. It’s Amazon’s tool that allows developers who are working with companies who have a shop on Amazon to showcase their brands they can create 3D versions of clothing or anything really to be honest with you, furnishings… and they can then create an AR experience for people which in turn is linked to the Amazon shop so they can actually make the purchase.
That’s still early days but we’re going to see a big growth in that sort of thing. Marketers are motivated because Ar and VR have the potential to move people through the entire purchase decision making process from awareness right htrough to the actual commercial transaction.
BMW with snapchat filter was a good one. For the BMW one series in Germany they did some great activation where you could through your mobile phone you could display the BMW car in your drive. It had millions of impressions and hundreds and thousands of shares.
Snapchat are another interesting company, marketers already work closely with snapchat as you know so there’s been an explosion
Safaria also there this idea of using filters and changing face apps and bringing in marketing to me it’s just an entry way into AR, it’s only the beginning of the process by which brands are starting to engage customers with AR experiences but it’s a good initial idea to show people how AR gets the attention of the audience.
6,
23:11
It’s growing. An area where I originally started doing research is in toursim, where VR is widely used now by a lot of travel agents in the travel agency shop to create an extra retail experience. It allows customers to put on a headset and they can go to see the resort in Turkey or Spain, they can get a 3 Dimensional view so that’s another area of growth.
You probably know my Twitter account ARVRinnovate if you get a chance I tend to put out a lot of examples on there.
7,
32:22
I don’t know if that any Irish companies have the ideal or luxury of having an idealised type of approach. My sense of this is that the real politics of this are that if they get a piece of business, they will develop content to suit that business at the moment. The market is not strong enough to support companies being able to dictate and say “we only want to work interact with this sort of client base or this type of project”.
8,
33:23
I’m not so knowledgeable about this one the best knowledge of someone who teaches marketing, good practice would be to involve the customer in the production process and get customer feedback.
The beauty about VR is that it’s a digital medium interactive so I guess you could send consumers small elements or tests or something. You could make some modifications for customers to check if it’s working. If they’re not doing it they should do but I understand there are practical costs and time challenges as well which may prevent that but it should be tested, yes.
9,
24:40
I’d like to think that there could be more at the moment. But at the moment my sense is that they operate very much on their own terms at the moment. I guess it’s because what they are working on is highly secret in many respects, they’re working on the latest iterations of head glasses and software, tools etc so there’s not really a huge amount of interface with the local ecosystem at the moment, that’s my sense, OK?
Having said that we do know that particularly Facebook, having Facebook labs which is based in Cork, although that’s a big part of the Facebook VR and AR development infrastructure globally is here in Ireland. They purchased a company in Cork called Infinity, which made lenses for Virtual Reality glasses, for Oculus actually. They’re a little bit secretive about that side but they employ several hundred people in Cork in Facebook labs
They tend… for example at my conference I always invite them but they don't speak.They don’t speak too much at various events so I think if you are writing it up say “they have an active, especially Facebook, not Google, Google have an AR/VR team but they don’t have a development team in Ireland Facebook certainly do.” I imagine that would help. but obviously what tends to happen in a lot of businesses is people leave and they set up their own spinoff companies and that already has happened by the way. There’s a good example for you of an Irish company called War Ducks, they’re listed on the techireland site. The lady who founded them is called Nicky Lannen, I know her well she goes to all the events and she’s been a speaker at my conference. Nicky actually worked in Facebook and she worked in the gaming division as a developer and she left to set up her own gaming company to make games, mobile app games. More recently she’s now 100% focused on VR and AR gaming, so it’s a gaming company.
So it would be great to see a lot more people like her involved. Who leave Facebook or Google. I guess that has to be the hope in Ireland but I’m not sure that that generally has happened as much as people would have expected when Google and Facebook came to Ireland.
10,
28:53
The short answer is yes, now is a good time to do it there is a lot of free tools, there’s a lot of resources. I think within companies particularly of a certain size and an IT department and people that are developers a lot of them are actually quite interested in taking on these projects. It’s actually quite a cool, sexy thing to do creating an AR VR thing so I think now is the time, absolutely. With all emerging technologies, the smarter companies they’re always ahead of the game, they’re always looking at, as I said, proof of concept tests, so I think if companies aren’t doing it now they run the risk of really missing a big opportunity when this becomes more mainstream. Absolutely they should be putting time and resources into this now…
Will it become saturated? That’s a hard question to answer in a way it’s a bit like has TV become oversaturated or has radio become oversaturated or has IT become saturated?
The short answer is no. Because I think these are fundamentally strong undisrupted technologies that really impact on all our lives and of the next generation so I don’t see it with the technology but if you mean will there be too many companies in the space, that’s a possibility yes. That there’s a shake up, that markets become mature… all markets mature but as the market matures you may see consolidation and companies leaving the market.
If you wanted a good example of this you could quote what’s happening in China because already in China we’ve seen a consolidation in the virtual reality market. There are VR arcades in China, lots of companies have already gone bust for example, even though the market is growing.
Because in a growing market it’s a bit like the gold rush, people are thinking in the same way as in the 1890s, people hear that California is where all the gold is. But the problem is everyone is hearing the same thing so 200,000 people arrive in California looking for gold. Some people will find gold but a lot of people don’t.
And that’s the danger now for a company, so many people are now setting up VR and AR companies and software firms, of course in reality unless they’re very smart they have a mean tool or product they won’t survive either. I see that there’s a potential for that but it’s not there yet. I think it is more likely that will happen in the 5-10 year horizon.
In the last year or two there’s been a lot more realism in the industry, a lot of the hype that was in the market a year or two ago has dissipated particularly as a lot of investors have now started to put the squeeze on the companies and invested in, in some instances it’s hundreds of millions and others it’s billions so there’s a lot more realism than in the past and there’s a sense of understanding particularly with augmented reality that the opportunity from this technology will not be realised for probably another 5-10 year horizon, it won’t be next year or the year after there is some really big technological challenges still around AR to make it work efficiently and effectively at a scale that can be used by companies never mind the general public. Certainly it’s very exciting but the real massive adoption rate I think people will be using it in their own personal time. At the moment people find it interesting but they’re not using it regularly.
Appendix E – Geoffery Allen
1,
Not yet, I don’t think it’s there yet, it’s still very early days in terms of the technology and where it’s at, so I don’t think essentially that would be true.
2,
No, Brexit has nothing to do with it. Again there is nobody buying, everybody is concerned everybody is looking for business, Brexit is not a factor in it. Again I will allude to the fact that the market is only starting we just got rejected only today for quite a big sizable job and it’s all... budgets will be next year, nobody has set aside dedicated budgets and the reason for that is where the technology is.
3,
Absolutely not because I would question the research, the standard I think people are consultants the big four and those kind of people are telling people what they want to hear of course they are trying to drum up business for themselves and besides from that… No, it concerns me greatly, I see telephone numbers thrown out on a regular basis and I question the justification for it. They’re talking billions...
Now I do have some reasonable market insights myself, and in the entertainment space I know Sony are ahead by 1% of where their target was they have 5% rather than 4% and that’s big in itself and they’re very happy but in industrial IOT VR and AR applications it’s non existent.
Everything is proof of concept I don’t think there's anybody out there doing any half decent VR projects. Not in Ireland anyway.
4,
We’re market leaders without a doubt. I can’t say there’s anybody else that could compete with us with the exception of Immersive VR education in Waterford who have gone public and have pretty much an unlimited award chest. I know that Nicky Lannen at War Ducks she is not focusing at all on industry but they have done some projects, they’re market projects they’re not actually industrial VR applications VRAI on the other hand would be targeting our market but I cannot see... Nial himself confessed to me that he is one of their four team, so they have four people we have 12 dedicated professionals and administration on top of that so we’ve opened (with) 16 people so the actual value proposition to create what we do takes a lot of people and in fact that is going to be a barrier of entry to stop this becoming a market similar to web design. Web design became a commodity it was raised from the bottom, the guy in the bedroom was competing against the professional service company and they decimated it because at the end of the day the majority of consumers will look at the bottom line and its cost and then take on somebody at the lowest cost who will often not be capable of delivering so that’s what happened in the web market, you got people who want websites for 300 Euros and that won’t happen with VR market because to get a professional enduring VR experience takes UX design, UI design, it takes all the relevant visualisation, it takes the scripting, it takes the narrative and all that so it’s not a simple case.
From my own perspective with in excess of 30 years producing digital media there will be no great hurry because this is the most sophisticated media ever produced bar none.
5,
Well, effectively for us I guess that we started by using it as experiential marketing which was good, it ticked the box. Unfortunately the client we used was a little bit immature and they kind of wanted to hold all of the kudos for themselves and they didn’t really allow… my team are very sophisticated and they understand not only how to make this stuff but how to promote it best across social media and other sources, so unfortunately the customer took it on themselves and I don’t think they got the response that they should have got. Now they did buy a number up to 50 or 60 headsets so it wasn’t like they hadn’t been committed but due to their own... ignorance for want of a better word... they assumed that they’d do a better job of distributing this stuff that we had just made so the relationship is frayed but again that’s experiential marketing. We have also done some data visualisation using 3D which was very well accepted. Unfortunately that was for Siemens and Siemens are a big company and they don’t hurry into anything. Beyond that, now we’ve switched over into training in live science mode. Ireland has a huge big cluster of sciences and we are focusing now on training in that space because what the VR allows you to experience what can be very very sophisticated value propositions. It goes well beyond anything in existence, like people say “We’ve had this argument you can video it” if you can video a piece of footage and you need to re-address it and I’d say 100 times or 99 times out of a hundred you have to reshoot the video and that’s not the case with VR you’re able to tweak it and revisit it on the fly.
The distribution as well of virtual reality the ability to send these experiential media pieces around the world pretty much the same as video in terms of reach and stuff once you’ve got the relevant player on the far end... is massive. the ability to do that to uniform messaging across a network for the likes of any kind of large scale multinational is priceless. That’s what I did back in the 90s in the US when postscript and PDF started off. That’s effectively what, that kind of messaging is instant messaging it’s email and it’s all the above messages but when you can add in the ability to add visuals and the interactivity it’s massive.
6,
To be honest with you the clients on both fronts… AR is still some way off, the hardware isn’t able to deliver the expectations to the client and much of that is to do with the hype that’s around the industry and a lot of fallacies. Like I even see in Microsoft their new hololens videos that they’re promoting on youtube and the like, what they are showing is just not right, it’s all done in post production so it doesn’t represent the actual user experience so when the user puts it on they go “Oh, that’s not what I ordered, blah blah blah” so the expectations are way up high and the fact of the matter is... for starters there’s a limited number of people that can produce this media and the budgets are so low, and really maturity is a long way off in terms of this technology as far as I can see, you know? And it’s not going to happen any time soon... and that goes for VR too because many of the clients just can't get it... in fact this interview was delayed by a friend of mine who’s down here who is well aware and has been conscious of my efforts over the last few years and he had a very very sophisticated Indian guy with him who is an academic and we had lunch together and they came round and they actually see... that they can... this guy didn’t get the merits of it you know and not many people do, to be frank. Even I see with customers we get people who are enthusiastic internal champions who are enthusiastic but that’s all it is, they’ve yet to be able to convince decision makers to commit to any half decent budget capable of returning a genuinely beneficial project, you know. You need to be spending 50k upwards to do anything at all to be honest. Ah! maybe I exaggerate, we just did a… proof of concept there for a big company the street value of that was 50 days of development, I’d like to think because I know that some of the bigger players have paid in excess $1000 for a day for development but the reality is that it is hard to get 4-500 quid a day for that. You know and you should be able to get like, there’s bad developers out there getting £1000 a day and the stuff we’re doing when you consider that they’re blended rate it’s incredible, you know. But people don’t understand the capability of this technology yet that’s the truth. And I say this technology as immersive not just as AR or VR, to me they’re the same, to produce AR and VR is the exact same truthfully.
7,
It’s a bit of an odd question because you have to try to be as neutral as you can, given that the power of this and the ability is to go across the globe in an instant you know? I explain to people what we are doing is taking the same technology and skill sets that launches the likes of Fortnite, that's the skill set, it’s gaming it can go around the world in seconds so you have to cross cultural, ethical or ethnic divides, languages... there’s a plethora of them. It’s across the spectrum like as I say the power is.. Netflix, big company, Amazon, big company well you’re going beyond their capabilities in terms of reach because they are limited by geographical locations and stuff like that. Now granted, I guess that if you can argue... my leanings are towards Google dominating in this space now and that’s only my own personal opinion but... how to back against them… because they’re established and a lot of the new hardwares are using their operating systems and I hear about Apple coming out into that in 2021. They’d be established in the market by then because as I say the groove I expect will accelerate the hardware has improved tremendously over the last 12 months so if you extrapolate that out into the next 24 months and 36 months and then Apple is going to arrive. No amount of marketing and etc etc. will replace the first market mover advantage and that’s the truth so if you can cordon off I believe we’re in the renown grab situation here and I believe that the bigger your studio is the more of the market you can box off and become the dominant player and the dominant player isn’t far be it actually from the most the best the largest the more sophisticated doesn’t win in the main... maybe you can argue Walt Disney, OK, I’ll give you that... but they just buy people out you know and maybe that’s what Apple will do too but, I don’t know, there’s quite big people playing for this base, all the big players… Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple come later to dance… I don’t know.
I’m an Apple fan I’ve had an Apple computer since 1984 you know I’ve always had one on my desk so it’s not like I don’t like them or anything like that but I don’t know... technology is a funny business you know? The bigger they come the harder they fall. What’s in it for Apple beyond the iphone, which I personally think is very overpriced and stuff like that so… we have to reach everyone and the ubiquity of this market will only grow when decent augmented reality experiences can be had on a phone or tablet. And that’s… We’ll have it when, I don’t know, I wouldn’t discount a large Chinese player coming in like 10 cents if you see how Huwewe just got its wings clipped by global forces conspiracy theories or not I don’t know how you want to look at that but if you see China in the light of a big overstate, that’s fair enough but you can argue that America is a big overstate isn’t it? So I don’t know. For us we’re agnostic. I don’t care what platform, we’re producing the content. I always say when I’m giving a talk when people say about the future or not I say well 25 years ago I went to New York just when the internet was starting up I remember doing the first initial websites and stuff like that so for the last 25 years the content that has populated the internet currently has been developed in the trillions of dollars range but in the next 25 years will be more sophisticated content which is far more richer. You might go back to today as a rich media as it was called when it came out. I started in a career called desktop publishing and then it came to multimedia and then it came to rich media... ultimately, again when you’re producing the media you talk about crossing cultures and languages. if I produce this media in Turkish I need to be able to speak Turkish I need to be able to spell Turkish I need to be able to understand Turkish culture so it’s just not a case of one size fits all but even though it does give you the power to disseminate media across email and I suspect even instant messenger they call it, it’s not limited to email it can be cool as an attachment as much they are not very heavy pieces of media. As I say you are in the dawn of the era it’s not going to be happening any time soon but it will come, it will come because the value proposition. I see my own, I have my daughters on headsets, the headsets are really good, my eldest two daughters the limitations are the youngest one can’t get her hands around the grips they are too small. They’re computer natives, and computer natives will... it’s amazing for me because I associate keyboard inputs and right now they are using Xbox controllers which is effectively innoculous controller and they can just zip through the interface if the design is going to be good enough I listen to a really good soundcloud podcast a guy called Aiden Cullen and he says today is the slowest day of your life so just go figure.
8,
Consumers don’t use our products but customers we try to get feedback asap like you we on board that because at the end of hte day the people we serve are the main experts we only provide media so
Were very sensitive around htat to get the full rigures of their critique asap, it’s expensive we’ll be developing something and they say “Ooh you can’t have that you know” so yeah at the end of the day it’s the consumer isn’t involved the customer is. The consumer doesn’t influence us at all. It’s funny because even we shy away from indigenous Irish companies becasue they’re too small. They don’t have the budgets they don’t have the demand for this stuff. This is about multinational global footprints and signs around the world.
9,
Do they really? Because… They are so so much is done online now you know, so the geographic location is irrelevant really. I wouldn’t mind somebody in Facebook to help us along, we’ve adopted their new platform and there’s not much out there you know? The answer is none. There is no influence.
10,
It is a good time, you need a budget and it is definitely not over saturated.
Appendix F – Thomas Strimbu
(pre conversation)
Geoff is a content provider, Thomas is a consultant and Alex is an educator.
...Geoff has 14 people on staff
They are very different to what Mersus does
Boston consultant group
KPMG so the major consulting houses
If you’re looking at people like Geoff the market is quite small
There’s a scope risk if you only talk to guys like us that you won’t actually get the full sense of the market or value of the market let’s say
If your thesis is based on finding the market value and trajectory of the XR market place it is necessary I would say.
It’s a tough question because it’s subjective, “are companies right to feel confident” is a very big question.
Estimated projection of the market
1.
No
2.
VR? We have a specific idea of VR… we call AR/VR “XR” We’re talking about a hardware difference.
I would say both are different markets but XR is all encompassing.
An early stage market we are on the first quarter of the bell curve of standard distribution so from early adopters we have early majority as the next phase and we may be transitioning to that. If we’re talking about companies...
In the research that I have seen broadly of companies that are not using XR today about 14% are testing it right now and about 30% say that they anticipate using it in the coming years so that means that we have interest but it doesn’t mean we have adoption yet.
2.
The impact of Brexit that I think is negligible it’s not a very big impact we have a couple of reasons I attribute that to...
From a software standpoint there is no financial or by any standard, impact of Brexit on the software so we’ll still be using the same software without any extra taxes or access problems. Most of the hardware providers are not based in the UK. We have Hololens and Oculus, all these companies the prices aren’t going to rise and the access isn’t going to change
3.
Yes I am confident about the future of the technology. Market value. I would say that I would subscribe to those predictions with some caveats. The caveats that I can grant that would make those not come true are some kind of broader economic downturn, let’s say Brexit hits Europe harder in some kind of unseen way that causes recession or Trump and his trade war with China impacts the price of technology coming from Taiwan or China.
Any of these externalities could have an impact on a year or two that is slowing growth. Something that could speed it up. Companies like ours with Eiremersive we are trying to find tax breaks for companies who are working in the area. That would of course speed the technology and adoption. It’s justified because I think there are really decent use cases but it’s not a guarantee that’s my opinion.
Justified in being confident?
I’d add to that businesses or people? If you are asking large companies, is Microsoft or Facebook, the answer is definitely yes. If the question is should Geoff from Mersus has the right to be confident or should I be confident I think the answer is definitely not. For somebody who is not well capitalised the timeline for mass market adoption is so long that even if its only 2-5 years that’s still so long to be afloat that there’s no reason for confidence. The larger guys that are well capitalised will definitely see the rewards.
3.
As a consultant I am a facilitator for technology adoption. So for all the companies who are in that early stage, I mentioned the 30% who are exploring using it in the next couple of years I come before the technology so as a consultant I help them to understand what it is how it integrates into their digital transformation strategy and what steps they take to implement it.
4.
I’d say the same as any other technology so you’re looking at either financial or
performance improvement so I could give a couple of examples…
With one of my clients currently they are a multi-billion dollar company and one of the solutions we have for them is called remote expert so someone has a problem in the manufacturing plant and they don’t know how to solve it in the past they would have had to call someone either in their business a third party supplier who might have had to visit the plant in order to solve the problem.
What we can do is we can offer Augmented Reality headsets so instead of sending someone, instead of having someone drive in or fly in to the site, now a person not physically on site can now see what’s happening and can help to walk the person through how to solve it.
So we’re providing cost savings in travel and helping people to know more about their equipment.
5.
If you look at the areas where AR and VR are making the biggest impact then you start to understand where the business cases and the largest business case at the moment happens to be in training so without offering any specifics I’d say that of all XR implementations, 17% of them are training so if you look at Walmart that is probably the most common, most frequently cited case study because every single Walmart in the US now utilises Virtual Reality headsets for training.
6.
I partner, I have a list of preferred partners. I start with the client, which is a large organisation who doesn’t use the technology. I will first give them a seminar about it just broadly informative then I will spend time on site doing a business process map. Just recently we wrapped up a two month feasibility study with a large organisation. In that process we explored their entire operations and said OK, out of everything you do, here are 5 places where XR technology can be beneficial. And when they agree to that we go out and find the people who do each one of those things the best and hire them.
7.
I have complete control over the content that’s produced. Of course I’m beholden to the
client I’m always looking to do what is best for them. Subject matter expert Broad content or specific content.
Neutral content…
Because I’m working on a per client basis I might not be very specific. But it is our requirement as a business to understand how applications from one industry might be applicable to a different industry.
So Walmart is utilising VR for training. Well they are retail, can I take what they are doing and apply its either application or its education to manufacturing or oil and gas and I think the answer is yes. So when I’m looking to create content I’m doing it for a specific client but when I’m trying to find content I’m looking everywhere.
8.
Did not answer.
9.
So it hasn’t yet, we haven’t seen an impact from it and I suppose it could but we need to do better at making a business case for them to make some investment here.
Why would they shift any of their XR operations to Ireland? And I don’t know a good reason that they would at the moment.
What is based here for Facebook and what is based here for Microsoft? Alright you see data centres you might see some... I know that Facebook does some content monitoring... but I don’t see much research and development here which is what we should be asking from them.
Do we have any form of competitive advantage to offer and the answer is really No. Ireland has a wonderful competitive advantage in their financial regulations so American businesses love to operate here because of beneficial taxes.
But are we Taiwan? Where we’ve got a homegrown hardware development ecosystem?
The answer is no.
Do we have a huge population that is technologically ready to be software developers? No. So I don’t think we’re going to be able to create a decent argument for that in the coming years.
10.
It depends on who you are as a business. If you are a small or medium enterprise the answer is no. What you require is something that’s inexpensive to adopt and has a disproportionately large benefit that’s cheap to get and makes a big impact and at the moment that is not the case XR. So you’re not going to find anything that’s off the shelf that’s going to make a huge impact in your operations.
But for large and global operations, it is a good time to be exploring it because they have the resources to invest in it and the reason they would want to invest in it now, early, is because it helps to advance them on the learning curve.
So they will have people in 2 years to 5 years when the technology is ready, they will already have people that are experts, they will already have a platform that is ready for it and know how to integrate it.
So if you’re not lets say 500 million in turnover, maybe even more than that, that’s still a relatively small company, but if you are 500 million in turnover annually or more you should be looking at XR.
“Oversaturated” is a really interesting way of looking at it, so what I’m hearing you say is “is it ever going to be commoditised? When a market becomes oversaturated is; there is very little differentiation among the products and it drives down the price.
So let’s take the example of website developers.
Would you say the market for website developers is oversaturated?
There’s a ton of them right? Today, you can find a website developer in India who will make a site for literally $20, and I do believe that we would get there with XR technology as well.
In terms of a content development so are we going to be able to find 3D developers very inexpensively? the answer is yes.
Is there another form of oversaturation? Is it going to become oversaturated in hardware? I don’t know, I think probably not. We’ll have a lot of consolidation in the market so the big players like Mocrosoft like Sony will start to buy up individual providers that come up with groundbreaking technology so we’d end up with 5-10 major players
Software yes, hardware no.
Candidate Declaration
Candidate Name: Can Tatli
I certify that the dissertation entitled: Should Irish VR/AR companies feel confident about the predicted growth of their sector and what can they do to improve their own brand strength as the market grows?
submitted for the degree of: MSc in Global Brand Management is the result of my own work and that where reference is made to the work of others, due acknowledgment is given.
Date: 26.08.2019
Supervisor Name: Carla De Tona
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this dissertation first and foremost to my beloved parents, Necmeddin Tatli and Candan Tatli. They always had my back and supported whatever decision I made with my life. I couldn’t have achieved coming this far without them, thank you mom and dad for making this possible for me. You have taught me time and time again to be fearless and brave against any challenge life throws my way. This was a huge one and I felt your support until the very end. I would also like to dedicate this to my brother, Kaan Tatli, who made me feel like I never left home even though I was far away.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my family and friends. They have been reassuring and have encouraged me throughout my time at Griffith College. It wouldn’t have been easy without them.
I’d like to thank Carla De Tona, my supervisor too. Who made sure I was on track and produced the best work according to my abilities under her guidance and support.
Lastly, I would like to thank all of my interviewees who helped me since day one until the completion of my dissertation. Your genuine interest and willingness to participate in my work is definitely the highlight of this research. I couldn’t have done a better job without you all, thank you.