Friday, March 29, 2024

How VR is Changing the Landscape for Mobile App Development?

Virtual reality has made its way out of the pages of science fiction and comic books to land squarely in the 21st Century. Virtual reality, or VR as it is more commonly known, is an immersive technology that constructs a virtual world with which users can interact. VR and its cousin augmented reality (AR) have gained a lot of popularity and attention over the past few years.

Most VR games require a headset that comes along with a rift s prescription lenses for a better gaming experience. However, as virtual reality begins to emerge, technology can become less expensive and more widely available. One of the areas that we can expect VR to make an impact on is mobile application development. It may hold the potential to fundamentally change the way we interact with everyday applications like the Document management solutions. Read on for more.

How VR Impacts Experiences

Why would app developers need to use VR? The answer is simple. The popularity of an application depends on the user experience it offers. An app with poor user experience is likely to garner fewer downloads and users than one that offers a good experience. The main advantage that VR brings to the app development table is the ability to offer users a fully-immersive experience.

Yes, VR is still in its infancy. That means we cannot yet replicate all five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. But VR has made significant progress in offering an environment with visual and audio simulations. In terms of app development, this presents an opportunity to deliver first-hand virtual experiences as well as greater activity and engagement. And that’s just the user side of the app. The dev teams behind the creation of new apps can also expect VR to impact the way they do things. This blog explores how VR can:

Offer Immersive First-Hand In-App Experiences

Change How Users Interact and Engage With Brands

Transform How App Development Teams Work

Let’s explore these in more detail below.

Offer Immersive First-Hand In-App Experiences

The E-commerce industry is worth hundreds of billions. Leaders like Amazon and Alibaba dominate the global digital landscape, with millions of smaller businesses all over the world competing as well. However, despite the convenience and ease of purchasing things online, many consumers still prefer the comfort of offline, in-person buying. Why? Simply because E-commerce applications lack the ability to let consumers experience the product fully. Consumers prefer the option to handle the products they want to buy. It lets them form their own opinion as to a product’s quality and suitability. Ultimately, these factors contribute significantly to the buying decision.

VR has the potential to offer a solution to one of E-commerce’s greatest weaknesses. VR developers are able to create immersive visual environments, which can mimic real life. This can allow E-commerce stores to create a VR app that allows consumers to “shop” in a way similar to how they do it in person. As VR technology improves, we may even see ways to virtually handle retail products just like in the real world.   

Change How Users Interact and Engage With Brands

Brands that invest in applications do so in an effort to get more users to engage with them. An application that encourages user engagement is more likely to increase the conversion rate for most brands. VR offers several ways to boost user engagement and activity by offering a more immersive environment than conventional apps. VR apps have more intuitive options for users to interact with the virtual environment. Since humans need to interact with things, brands can leverage VR to increase customer engagement. A retail brand offering customized products, for example, can create a VR model that allows the customer to see exactly what their customized product will look like.   

Transform How App Development Teams Work

It’s not just the user side of new apps that will see the benefit of VR. The app development process itself has the potential to see a massive transformation as a result of VR technology. The first thing that developers need to pay attention to is learning how to control VR app development costs. Most VR apps will require users to have a headset of their own. In addition to this fixed cost, the client’s specifications may require even more development costs. However, as VR progresses out of its infancy, the technology may become cheaper and more widely available.

VR may also have an impact on how developers market their apps. App marketing is an important tool that encourages users to download and use an app. Ideally, it should highlight the benefits that using the app brings. VR environments can be a useful medium to market apps, in a way that encourages VR users to download and interact with the app. Developers will also need to look at new ways to develop interfaces in the context of VR.

Conclusion

Mobile applications are in use in nearly every industry you could think of. From agriculture to marketing to manufacturing to fossil fuels, many industries have internally designed and maintained apps. While most people are familiar with touchscreens to interact with apps, VR threatens to overhaul the entire design system that we are used to. Conventional apps and VR offer very different ways to interact with digital environments. It will be interesting to see how technological advances in VR will trickle down into our daily lives. Will we interact with digital brands the same way as we do in brick-and-mortar stores? Only time will tell.