How Businesses Can Drive ROI from Their Mixed Reality Investments

In industrial design, mixed reality can shorten design reviews from days to hours, as physical mockups can be replaced with life-size, lifelike digital objects that can be edited in real time. With XR, designers and other stakeholders do not need to be co-located, but can join the session from anywhere in the world. This can save companies tens of thousands of dollars per iteration, and the added speed enables more iterations, ultimately enabling companies to build better products. In addition to the time saved, this can add up to savings of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars annually. 

Similarly, an hour spent in a traditional flight simulator can cost thousands of dollars due to the extremely high purchase price and cost of travel to and operating the simulator. And that’s nothing compared to operating an actual fighter jet, which can cost more than 40,000 dollars per hour. If you are able to replace a flight simulator worth several million dollars with an XR headset or reduce training hours needed in real fighters per trainee by even a fraction, the return on investment of buying a high-end headset costing only four figures is going to be staggeringly high in the long run. 

Once you’ve outlined your goals, start mapping your use cases as concretely as possible. Consider practical questions, such as what you want people to achieve in the mixed reality scenario. How will they do the work in practice: do they need to collaborate with others in the same scenario, do they need to move around, do they need to use controllers or tools, or could they use their own hands instead? What kind of visual quality do you need: is it enough if the graphics are simple and game-like, or do you need photorealistic, lifelike visuals?  

Answering these practical questions helps you build a wishlist of capabilities and ask the right questions from different technology providers. Only by choosing devices that can deliver on the requirements of your use case will you reach the top-level goals and achieve a sufficient return on investment. 

What software do you need support for? 

Which 3D engine or software do you intend to use for mixed reality? This is the most crucial question. Suppose the headset you wish to use has no official support for your intended application. You might need to do dozens or even hundreds of hours of troubleshooting or building custom plugins. In the worst case, you might find out that the devices you’ve purchased won’t even work. By choosing headsets that officially support your critical applications, you can easily save thousands of dollars. 

What level of visual quality is needed? 

Are you looking for photorealism, or will a lower resolution work? Do you need accurate color reproduction so that colors appear exactly the same as in the real world? Generally speaking, the more accurately you want to match the real world, the more high-end the devices will need to be. If visual quality is important for your use case, it doesn’t make sense to go for a cheaper device simply to save some money, because it will ultimately end up hurting the quality and limiting what can be achieved. 

 In most cases, better visual quality also means you need devices tethered to a computer. This is especially true for industrial 3D design and simulation software, such as Autodesk VRED or Lockheed Martin’s Prepar3D, which can work with lower end headsets as well, but require headsets with extremely high visual fidelity in order for the user to experience lifelike visuals. This is because standalone headsets use different chipsets compared to PC-powered headsets. While standalone headsets are more mobile, they simply can’t produce the same kind of visual quality in professional applications that tethered headsets offer.  

What are the tracking requirements? 

Tracking allows VR/XR applications to synchronize your movements in the real world with those in the virtual environment in real time. Without proper tracking, if you try to lean or move your head’s position, the entire virtual world would move with your head’s movement because it would not be tracked. This would create an unrealistic virtual experience and even cause cybersickness.

There are several positional tracking providers on the market. While several headsets, including the XR-4, already feature inside-out tracking, SteamVR tracking using base stations is still the most well-known and widely used positional tracking method. Other solutions, such as ART and OptiTrack, are also available and can be a better fit in different kinds of industrial VR/XR use cases, such as automotive design, in-car tracking, cockpit integrations, and large-scale tracking. 

Is the device meant for a single, specific user or to be worn by several people? 

Determining if your device will be mainly for a single user or if multiple people will be wearing the same device at different times is crucial. For example, not all headsets enable you to wear glasses while using them, and this will be a problem if you have multiple people using the same device.

If the user can’t wear glasses, you’ll need to order custom lenses (if the headset even supports switching them yourself) or purchase additional devices for every user with a different vision, increasing costs and reducing usability.

Different people also have different size heads, and the distance between their eyes differs (this is called interpupillary distance, or IPD for short). This means the lenses inside the headset must also be adjusted for each person.

Some headsets do this automatically for each user, while some have manual adjustments. If you need to have a device used by multiple people who are not proficient at using XR headsets, you should choose a device with automatic IPD adjustment. 

What kind of control scheme do you need?  

You also need to think of the control schemes your applications will need to support. For example, will you use different controllers or do you need support for hand gesture controls? 

If your expected end user will have little experience with mixed reality devices, VR controllers or other complex control schemes might not be an ideal solution. In these types of scenarios, built-in hand tracking can be a good choice, since it allows the user to operate using their own hands and also enables easy interaction with tools or controls they are already familiar with (e.g. a steering wheel or airplane cockpit in the case of simulation training). However, this requires hand-tracking support, which is not available on all devices. 

Are there special security or privacy requirements?  

While some consumer-driven use cases like entertainment are straightforward, professional mixed reality applications might have particular security or privacy requirements. These include medical research, governmental applications, and high-security environments like nuclear power plants or other industrial sites.

For high-security applications, the country of manufacturing or privacy policies can play a big role in choosing a device provider. For example, almost all consumer-oriented devices are manufactured in China, which means they are not compliant with high-security and government use cases. Some consumer-grade devices might even require you to hand over biometric information such as eye-tracking data to third parties. 

For the highest security requirements in the United States, devices need to be compliant with Trade Agreements Act (TAA) and other legislation, which is a threshold only a few devices are able to meet. A good example of this is Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition, which is fully TAA compliant, fully offline, and does not require the user to create any kind of account, ensuring total privacy and deployability even in the most secure locations. 

What kind of technical support is available?  

It’s not just about purchasing the right device. For professional mixed reality use cases, it is very important that there is dedicated support available if any problems arise with the setup. 

As use cases and, in particular, the technical aspects of mixed reality simulators can be very specialized, it might be impossible to find solutions on more generic forums that focus mainly on consumer applications. Therefore, you should ensure that the immersive device manufacturer can offer support if or when problems arise and that they can look at those specialized use cases you might be utilizing. 

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