A great idea and a strong will to succeed are just not enough in today’s world. If you’re an entrepreneur who’s looking to scale and grow, you will want to look into funding your start-up business. One of the biggest challenges for small business owners is finding the funds and the right partners to grow their businesses. Surveys show that a lack of capital is one of the most common reasons why small businesses fail.

Securing an investor who is committed to your long-term success and has an interest in your industry and mission will add value far beyond capital backing. While capital and cash flow will extend the runaway to success, your business should collect the benefits of business mentors that you got alongside with investment. We were lucky enough to find those qualities in our present partners from Fil Rouge Capital, whose experience and knowledge will drive us in all the right directions.

About a year ago as we were working on some products for our clients, we noticed that we are spending a significant amount of time working on hand interaction features, and that was the time an idea started to form and the OctoXR was born. OctoXR is a Unity 3D plugin that simplifies the development of VR, AR, and MR applications and experiences for developers and users. The tool was conceived as an addition to the Unity 3D development platform and is based on a low-code / no-code mode of visual development. This solves the problem of the need for a high degree of programming knowledge in the development of VR, AR, and MR applications and solutions. By developing its modules and technologies for hand control, physics, multi-user networking, in-display debugging tools, visual programming, and many other features, the product will significantly contribute to the faster and easier development of XR applications in the global market.

A great idea and a strong will to succeed are just not enough in today’s world. If you’re an entrepreneur who’s looking to scale and grow, you will want to look into funding your start-up business.

Corporate training and development programs have followed traditional paths, usually with a combination of written materials, classroom lectures, outdated videos, online courses, and hands-on observation of an instructor regardless of whether the topic is production training, sales pitching, or leadership coaching. But as companies transform their businesses to be more digital, especially due to the corona crisis, the rise of virtual reality (VR) technology provides an opportunity to reshape traditional training methods to better serve a more digitally connected and diverse workforce. By using VR training, it is possible to create scenarios that are not only more engaging and immersive but also more effective and safer than traditional training methods.

Each day companies are faced with the challenge of upgrading existing employee skills to increase production performance and to train new hires to be production-ready with the basic technical, safety, and quality skills. According to go2HR  more than 40% of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year, so it is not uncommon for companies such as BMW to invest around 373 million Euro a year in employee training.

Huge sums of money are being invested in training across the globe, yet in many cases, the training procedures are not only outdated, slow and many times unsafe but do not clearly outline the complexity of the technical tasks they should teach. Longer training times, employees under-performing, and safety risks can have a hazardous domino effect on the industrial employer. Virtual Reality technology can not only close the gap between outdated training methods but also increase worker production, safety, efficiency, satisfaction, and overall task performance rates in the long run – when compared to training with traditional methods.

According to the Artillery Intelligence report , enterprise VR will grow from $829 million in 2018 to $4.26 billion in 2023, a 39 percent compound annual growth rate. This includes any spending on VR technology from enterprise buyers, including deployed hardware, software running on VR headsets, and VR creation tools (e.g. Unity or Unreal). Employee training will be a key use case in industrial segments and retail.

The benefits of VR for improving learning outcomes has been clear for some time. Companies across many industries have adopted the technology to train their employees better. Enterprises have seen dramatic cuts in costs and time spent training.

Using the headset and controllers or hand gestures, trainees look, speak, and move freely in a 3D virtual space, interacting with simulated real-world tools, machinery, and other trainees and instructors. Virtual reality is enabling workplace scenarios that were once too difficult, expensive, or dangerous to train for, become vastly more practical, cost-effective, and safe in an immersive simulation.  When combined with real-life simulations and learning curriculum developed by experts, the result is trainees learning in the best way possible — through personal experience — significantly improving learning retention, job performance, team collaboration, workplace safety, and cost.

Real-life situations and training scenarios can be created not only to make learning more interactive but also to bring students and trainees together, no matter where the location – improving the efficiency of training and potentially reducing the time required to train staff up to standard.

Another advantage of VR is that it’s more in-depth compared to other training methods. As mentioned earlier, training in real-world scenarios is anecdotal. In contrast, actions in VR can be quantified so you can understand exactly how each action was performed. The result is a data-rich, contextual timeline of all the actions which took place during the session. This provides a reinforced feedback loop that results in continual improvements, making VR simulations an integrated component of the enterprises learning strategy.

One of the biggest advantages of using VR to train employees is the ability to iterate. By understanding which behaviors lead to success, you can encourage and redesign the training programs. This provides additional feedback and a deeper understanding of human behavior. The systematic approach to improving learning ensures that processes are followed to deliver best practices to the employees.

Put another way, let your employees make expensive and dangerous mistakes in VR and not in real-world scenarios where the stakes are much higher.

Corporate training and development programs have followed traditional paths, usually with a combination of written materials, classroom lectures, outdated videos, online courses, and hands-on observation of an instructor regardless of whether the topic is production training, sales pitching, or leadership coaching.

Augmented reality is a powerful tool that consumers no longer just desire, but expect. Brands who have implemented AR in advertising, sales, education, product design, customer entertainment are now experiencing performance benefits and seeing increases in conversion rates.

Augmented reality is a powerful tool that consumers no longer just desire, but expect. Brands who have implemented AR in advertising, sales, education, product design, customer entertainment are now experiencing performance benefits and seeing increases in conversion rates. Through the use of AR, brands can offer their shoppers detailed product information in a more interesting and engaging way, allowing consumers to see more of the benefits that a product can provide.

Based on a Zappar report around the brain analysis of people using AR, brand awareness can increase by up to 70% through the use of augmented reality. No wonder brands are implementing AR campaigns like never before. In order to build a sense of loyalty and a lasting impression on their customers, brands have found that AR is able to do this in an effective and long-term way. AR ads are more successfully remembered by consumers because of their interactiveness and ability to be shared.

To define what we mean by AR advertising, these are paid media placements that allow consumers to activate their smartphone camera and superimpose branded animations in the real world. This is usually to promote or visualize a given advertiser’s products.

Advertising is one of the most lucrative AR subsectors, on pace to reach $1.41 billion this year and $8.02 billion by 2024, with a 54,43% compound annual growth rate.

With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that that ad revenue for AR has reached well over the billion-dollar mark. Brands are recognizing the value of this kind of advertising and taking advantage of its campaign performance.

As is the case across the global economy, mobile AR sectors will be impacted unevenly by ongoing global lockdowns. Given that software mostly fares well in shelter-in-place life, the impact on mobile AR will be mostly positive.

For example, quarantine-friendly consumer AR like social lenses are trending up; and social distancing compels enterprise remote-AR support. These factors will boost near-term adoption while exposing the technology… which in-turn supports its longer-term sustained adoption.

Brand advertisers are also attracted to AR’s business case that continues to be validated in ROI metrics and one of the best metrics is conversion rate. Higher conversion rates indicate that consumers are satisfied with a large part of the marketing strategy and content that is being presented to them. The main reason why AR advertisements achieve high conversion rates is immersive product try-on that encourages informed purchases. Although every ‘high’ conversion rate is unique to each industry, a twenty to eighty percent, which was measured conversion rate on AR ads, is over ten times higher than the average conversion rate across all industries on the search network.

As mentioned, campaigns such as L’Oréal’s AR showcases have seen increased conversion rates, and have continued to work with brands such as Poplar in order to successfully create even more. Plus, brands like the pizza chain Papa Johns have joined in and gained a 25% conversion rate with their AR campaigns.

The proof of AR is in its conversions. While many brands are still using AR to engage their followers and increase brand awareness, the benefits of AR as a conversion tool are only increasing.

As more and more brands continue to report on successful conversion rates, we can expect the adoption of AR to move away from simple engagement into an active channel in the marketer’s toolkit to drive higher conversions and sales.

Activities within the `Emergency medical training 3D` project focused on early-stage innovation development to conduct technical and commercial validation of an innovative concept for 3D emergency education training to minimize potential technical and commercial risks. Through the conducted research, the applicant realized that virtual and augmented reality, due to their immersiveness, represents a decisive opportunity to create new or improve existing skills in employees. Through this project, comprehensive commercial and technical verification and validation of research results with commercial potential were undertaken.

The planned duration of the project is 12 months, within which an attempt was made to prove that technological risks associated with the product can or cannot be solved or whether the technological risk is such that the proposed technology can or cannot function in the environment. The project was implemented through 6 key points to try to demonstrate technical feasibility as follows: code development, 3D modeling and testing, interface design, video animation, and optimization and testing of video call module and multi-user interaction functionality. In addition to the technical feasibility demonstration activities, a CBA, an intellectual property protection plan, and a development concept and strategy will be developed.

The total value of the project is HR 556,904.48, of which HRK 389.751,32 is financed from grants and HRK 167.153,16 represents the applicant’s own participation.

After the project ended, Spectre d.o.o. started working with the Institute of Emergency Medicine Osijek – baranja county on developing virtual reality applications for staff training.

Spectre d.o.o. plans to continue the development of the project by applying to the ERDF to fund innovation and R&D projects.

Activities within the `Emergency medical training 3D` project focused on early-stage innovation development to conduct technical and commercial validation of an innovative concept for 3D emergency education training to minimize potential technical and commercial risks. 

Through the years, Spectre company was a part of numerous conferences and summits where we presented solutions and benefits that virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, along with other new technologies like 5G or artificial intelligence, bring to the industry and business development. After a large number of domestic conferences, it was time to showcase our solutions and products on the international stage.

The two biggest conferences that we did were the ones with Huawei Technologies Co. The first one was the Fourth China CEEC Conference in Belgrade, where we were a part of the Huawei 5G use case presentation team with our augmented and mixed reality products. We showed how mixed reality technologies can speed up and enhance product design and development. Almost every industry nowadays is responding to a growing need to deliver greater innovation, faster and more effectively, at better prices. 

That means finding a way to develop products more quickly and more efficiently, reducing time to market while taking cost and complexity out of the process. Few days after the conference, our colleagues from Huawei shared a video with us that shows our presentation broadcasting on China national television with 650 million viewers every day, it was a pretty sweet commercial reach.

After the success we had in Belgrade, we were invited to participate in Digital Transformation Forum in Kyiv in November of 2019. There we showcased how the implementation of 5G networks will impact augmented and mixed reality. Specifically, we presented a solution that shows what innovative improvements we can make in education and collaboration between students using AR and MR technologies alongside 5G. Visualizing content in 3D that was previously only learned through the book reduces learning time, gives students much better knowledge retention and more confidence to act on what they learned. We are especially glad that we had a chance to show our demo to some members of the Ukrainian government.

There were a lot of plans for 2020. roadshow with Huawei Technologies Co., but unfortunately, everything got postponed due to the COVID-19 burst that shook the world. While we wait for the new conferences and forums, we are working hard to develop even more applications and products using virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies.

Through the years, Spectre company was a part of numerous conferences and summits where we presented solutions and benefits that virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, along with other new technologies like 5G or artificial intelligence, bring to the industry and business development.

Huawei and Spectre on digital transformation

Hear our thoughts

SpectreXR partners with FRC

Virtual Reality Training

Augmented Reality Advertising

Emergency medical training 3D

Huawei and Spectre on digital transformation