VRX: Tell us a little more about your role in the XR industry
CH: I wear a couple of hats. As the CTO at The Park Playground, I focus on driving mainstream adoption of XR in the entertainment industry. Growing the user base through our Location based venues on one side and highlighting the potential of XR to potential content creators or IP providers like broadcasters on the other hand. As VRARA Chapter President for Belgium, I focus on XR adoption in other industries. Marketing, AEC, training, and entertainment are the most mature sectors in our chapter. Lastly, as founder at Edorble, I look at VR adoption in education.
VRX: In your line of work, what are some of the biggest challenges you see in the adoption and use of VR/AR/MR?
CH: The Reliability and guidance of the XR experience.
We can't forget that non-technical profiles are our end users. We have to create with them in mind, making sure that we sell value and not technology. It's essential that regardless of the industry, the XR experience is easy to use and operate. Right now it's often a hassle to even get to experience the value proposition. Until then operators and hosts around the XR offering need to make sure the user experience is perfect, taking away all remaining friction to adopt.
And for those people to be able to do that, the product needs to be reliable. The technology advancements were making are amazing, but tend to be fragile. Typical for high innovation products, but deadly for mass adoption. For LBE, in the frontline with a mainstream, untrained, audience, you want to be as reliable as let's say a bowling ball because that's what you're competing with.
VRX: Where do you see the biggest opportunities and innovations arising? What three things do you think will take the industry onto the next level?
CH: First For LBXRE, there’s an opportunity to be the first in mind for people looking to have a good time with friends, family, and colleagues. That’s something you don’t achieve as a sole company but as a sector. Right now for customers, it’s as if we’re all offering the same night out ‘let's do XR.’ So this supposedly puts all of us in competition. I’d argue it’s too early to see other LBXRE’s as competition as our offerings are often very different. It would be in all of our benefits if we’d help customers understand the differences in our offerings and why they should experience each single of our experiences like they want to see different movies. We might find that some of us are competing, but then it’s up to those individual companies to decide if they want to compete already or have agreements f.e respecting each other's geographic regions. So a cross-sector initiative to educate our customers, making them try several of our offerings, would be the thing for LBXRE.
Second, for the in-home market, I'm very much looking forward to 5G streaming into headsets, with standalone headsets as a step in between. Only at this point, I expect we'll experience the same surge of adoption as the smartphone market when the iPhone happened.
Third, I believe there's a massive opportunity in doing more with our ears. Although already some companies are on this, I'd like to see the hardware on this front to evolve faster.
VRX: What key topics are you most interested to find out more about?
CH: I'd love to learn about value props or products that have achieved considerable traction at scale. I feel there's been a lot of promising signals the past year's and I want to learn who has successfully turned an XR solution in a necessity instead of a gimmick.
VRX: What aspect of VRX Europe are you most looking forward to?
CH: The dynamics of cross-industry talents and learning how they succeeded in mass adoption in their respective industries. And if not, what is preventing them.
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