How Extended Reality Can Impact Our Daily Lives

With extended reality technology, people can be fully immersed in virtual environments and digital landscapes. From videogames to healthcare and the metaverse, extended reality technology is utilized to improve our daily lives and offer us state-of-the-art digital experiences. Here are a few ways extended reality impacts major digital projects that can influence our day-to-day lives.

What is Extended Reality?

Extended reality (XR) describes any immersive technology that can combine our physical and digital worlds. XR can include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or mixed reality (MR) technologies which merge the real and digital world to varying degrees of completeness. There are many applications for these technologies that can improve various industries worldwide.

Business

Extended reality for businesses can allow customers to try products digitally before purchasing them. With these XR technologies, customers can try on clothes virtually, get 3D tours of properties, or place virtual furniture items in their homes using their smartphones. These technological possibilities will save both businesses and customers time and money while offering consumers a more engaging shopping experience.

Healthcare

Extended reality in healthcare has greatly improved the quality of care given to specific patients. Doctors and surgeons in training can utilize extended reality to practice complex procedures in no-risk environments. Surgeons can also use AR glasses to see a virtual display of patient stats and vital information up-front without using either hand during surgeries. These AR glasses can also live stream from the surgeon’s perspective and give the surgeon feedback from other medical professionals who are watching in real-time. This technology creates more collaborative and efficient procedures to help both doctors and patients.

Videogames

The videogame industry is a natural marketplace for XR technology to blossom. Today, many videogames utilize XR options for more immersive gameplay. Though XR is the frontier of gaming, it requires high-quality game creation and a significant investment upfront to develop fully immersive games with quality resolution and seamless movement integration. New ways of creating video games are being explored along with the immersive components. The videogame industry faces many challenges regarding fraud, malware, and other security issues that can impact gamers and their investments. With the creation of NFT videogames, in-game items are minted into NFTs and fully secured on the blockchain within the game. These new technologies are helping game developers create more secure and immersive videogame experiences.

Crypto and The Metaverse

The metaverse is perhaps the most ambitious endeavor to completely merge our real and virtual lives. Once complete, the metaverse will be a vast network of interconnected, synchronous digital universes where users can interact, create, and exchange with each other online. Similar to NFT video games, the metaverse will be run off of a self-sustaining crypto economy that can scale and regulate as more users participate in the exchange. Every digital asset in these programs will be a metaverse NFT, held on the blockchain that supports that meta platform. As a metaverse user, you have several options for how immersive you want your experience to be. You can go fully immersive and have different digital experiences like virtual concerts, digital hangouts with friends, and more. Or, you can access the metaverse and all its experiences through your laptop in a less-immersive way. Regardless of your level of immersion, the metaverse is always synchronous and never-ending, so you and anyone else can interact with and ‘live’ in this digital world.

The applications and use of extended reality technology are improving many industries worldwide. As these technologies continue to be developed, we will see an even greater digitalization of our lives.