Extended Reality or XR is a term that surrounds the concepts of Augmented (AR), Mixed (MR), and Virtual realities (VR). It encompasses virtual, immersive, and interactive environments also called the “Metaverse”. From 27-30th October, we had the opportunity to present our work on extended reality at the 11th edition of the Kikk festival, the biggest digital art & creative festival in Belgium.
Why XR?
We believe that XR is at a tipping point, a crossroads between irrealistic expectations and huge potential. The added value of XR is not easy to understand yet, especially because it goes beyond what we are used to imagining and conceiving.
Timing is key. 20 years ago, before the rise of web 2.0 and after the dot com bubble organizations felt something new was approaching without any certainty on whether to invest in it or not. Turns out that the evolution of the web over the past 20 years showed that organizations that invested in experimenting with this new technology were better off than the ones that did not.
This is why we seized the opportunity at the KIKK festival and its 30.000+ visitors to confront our ideas and projects . We gathered a lot of feedback from the 650+ users who tested our apps and shared experiences on the topic.
3 take away from our participation at the Kikk festival
- Time investment for XR projects seems overestimated
During our conference we showed how we delivered affordable XR projects at our clients and how [Belgian] organisations could do the same. Despite our attempt to disclose our efforts to realize some “affordable” use cases, organisations still tend to believe that XR projects will take huge amounts of time and resources. - Mixed reality projects generate more traction (than VR ones)
During the event we presented 4 experiences: 2 in virtual reality (VR) and 2 in mixed reality (MR). Turns out that our audience was more attracted by MR. The can easily be explained by people’s behaviour. Due to the full immersion of VR, people tend to be more cautious and less safe when wearing a VR headset in a public space. This prevents them from seeing and feeling the real world. But this is really our feel and experience. - A missed opportunity for the organizations aimed at investing in XR
The KIKK festival gathers many XR players from the market and from all over the world (France and Quebec for example). However, only a few organisations were there to actually invest in XR initatives. This clearly represents a missed opportunity for them to have meaningful conversations with so many experts from many countries.
If you also missed the Kikk, here’s a short movie that sumarizes our impressions about the event.
See you there next year?
