3 developer strategies to boost customer engagement with XR

As online retailers slowly adapt to a growing consumer demand for “try before you buy” shopping, developing immersive customer experiences has become a lucrative endeavor. In a 2022 study by the Harvard Business Review, 56% of shoppers who interacted with an augmented reality (AR) application reported greater confidence in the quality of a product and viewed more products on average than those browsing on other channels.

The implications for specialized industrial products are even greater. Virtual showrooms have the potential to replace physical prototypes, eliminate the need for on-site visits, and increase the versatility of sales operations in the field by offering more opportunities for ad hoc demos.

Across industries, technology teams are exploring extended reality (XR) to address emergent business needs, recoup costs, and add versatility to their sales and marketing functions.

Whether an XR application allows customers to walk through an influencer’s virtual storefront, see exploded virtual models of colossal industrial machines, or assess potential purchases from a mobile phone, immersive experiences reliably translate to improved sales conversions, higher engagement, and greater customer satisfaction.

Given the positive reception by consumers and the increasing affordability of virtual technology, analysts predict that the global XR market could top $1.9 trillion (USD) by 2032. Yet despite such favorable indices, the majority of enterprises have been slow to embrace immersive customer experiences.

Let’s explore some of the best strategies for realizing the potential of these potent technologies.

1. Rethink data transparency

We’ve already discussed several of the reasons why enterprises might consider augmenting their sales and marketing efforts with XR experiences, but the road to attaining buy-in as a developer isn’t always straightforward. Though technical considerations remain an obvious hurdle, the biggest impediments are often organizational in nature. One such example is a prevailing reluctance to share proprietary data between interdisciplinary teams – and that’s to be expected, especially with costly 3D data.

The industrial production of consumer goods requires immense data sets and complex CAD models, both of which translate to a significant investment of human capital and long development cycles. It’s only natural to be judicious about how those assets are handled. But this kind of garden wall mentality fails to actualize the real value of those data, namely their ability to jumpstart the development of powerful immersive customer experiences.

By repurposing design data in XR experiences, major brands are discovering new ways to not only drive sales but also reduce costs, improve analytics, and produce cascading benefits for the organization at large.

While developing an end-to-end VR pipeline, Volvo engineers found that CAD models for factory production could also star in consumer-facing driving simulators and in virtual production meetings, resulting in a more streamlined development process that required fewer physical prototypes.

Bosch Rexroth, one of the leading manufacturers of hydraulic drive and control technologies, added versatility to its sales operations by creating a virtual showroom for its sales teams to exhibit interactive models of its industrial machinery. Once free of the constraints of relocating heavy machinery, their sales teams found that the virtual showroom doubled customer engagement and shortened time-to-market for new products.

This kind of lateral thinking opens new possibilities for the way existing data can inform XR development. It’s worth looking at the way data is handled within your organization and ideating around security-compliant and IP-sensitive ways to translate 3D data into potentially impactful XR applications.

2. Develop quality assets

It’s not enough to access and reuse 3D data owned by product lifecycle teams. To create immersive customer experiences that really move the needle, XR developers also need to adopt technologies that facilitate rapid development without the need for recreating CAD or BIM models with digital content creation (DCC) tools like Blender or Maya.

The right technology will simplify the process of importing, repurposing, and adding value to 3D data. That’s why SmartPixels, an innovative design firm specializing in bespoke “product configurator” software, leveraged Pixyz technology to model Camille Fournet’s line of luxury watch straps as 3D assets.

Unity’s Pixyz Plugin helped jumpstart modeling by dynamically interpreting and adapting CAD data into tessellated meshes that could then be easily decimated to the optimal polycounts. After ingesting Camille Fournet’s internal Product Data Model (PDM) format, SmartPixels then created custom textures and shader graphs to accurately virtualize their world-class leathers.

By creating photorealistic, instantly swappable assets from native data, SmartPixels was able to build a highly personalized checkout flow that permitted users to create trillions of potential product combinations and increase customer conversions by 400%.

At the import stage, data fidelity is key. Unity Industry preserves metadata and offers intuitive modeling controls for refining the degree of realism required for the implementation. The better the model integrity, the more likely it is that the application will serve different, often unexpected use cases.

The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital used Unity to build an interactive surgical training tool that found a surprising second life in clinical settings as an immersive virtual experience for patients. In a shared virtual space, pediatric surgeons and younger patients can navigate realistic anatomical diagrams to understand and plan procedures together. It’s become a vital tool for building trust during patient consultations.

3. Choose platform-agnostic deployment

As with any software development, the creative process of building XR apps too often diverts into recursive iteration cycles dedicated to optimizing performance or reconfiguring render pipelines. Choosing the right technology is critical to avoiding these pitfalls.

Audi demonstrated this with its impressive Virtual Exhibit XR in 2023. Following its mixed-reality HoloLens experience in 2017, which leveraged Unity’s Pixyz Plugin to turn CAD data into dynamically animated 3D objects in real-world surroundings, the Virtual Exhibit XR experience offered trade show attendees an up-close view of the Audi Q6 e-tron in both AR and VR modes.

Having already mastered the CAD data ingestion and modeling process, Audi engineers still faced the challenge of developing for the Apple Vision Pro platform. Using the Unity Editor’s visionOS support and purpose-built package utilities, their team was able to merge an existing XR application built for iOS and optimize it for use with the Apple Vision Pro.

It’s important to choose out-of-the-box solutions that simplify the execution phase so that technology teams can continue to explore new features and use cases. Audi chose Unity to streamline deployment from one hardware platform to another with minimal configuration.

Unity Industry for XR developers

The simplest immersive customer experiences only require a smartphone or tablet, but modern 3D development frameworks can also be used to build robust virtual reality applications that expand marketing touchpoints.

Unity Industry is an all-in-one solution that offers complex data ingestion, real-time modeling, and simplified deployment on multiple platforms. With integrated support for Visual Studio and other IDEs, comprehensive analytics insights, and cloud-based asset management, Unity Industry provides an intuitive workflow for XR teams looking to rapidly build immersive customer experiences.

In addition to the Unity Editor’s real-time 3D development environment, Unity Industry offers comprehensive insights into how prospective and converted customers engage with virtual storefronts with built-in tools for runtime management and device memory optimizations.

With dozens of first-party plugins and packages, Unity’s ecosystem now features more extensive library support than ever for XR development, including:

• XR Interaction (XRI) Toolkit: A high-level components library built to simplify the development of VR, AR, and spatial computing experiences.
• AR Foundation: A package featuring interfaces for various provider plug-ins that enable cross-platform extensibility for industry-leading XR platforms and frameworks such as Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, ARCore, ARKit, and HoloLens.
• XR Hands: An API that enables access to hand-tracking data from devices that support it.

XR experiences have consistently shown promise as high-ROI endeavors for consumer products enterprises seeking to engage customers in novel ways. Unity Industry’s state-of-the-art data ingestion pipelines and real-time 3D development environment helps liberate CAD data, jumpstart immersive experiences, and reach customers in a whole new dimension.

To see Unity Industry in action, check out our resources for AR/VR development.