How are Swiss companies doing after one year of Corona?

Market researchers Superdata predicted a revenue growth of 0.6 billion US dollars in the augmented, mixed and virtual reality (AR, MR, VR) sector last year. Stay at home thanks. And yet Corona has hit many Swiss companies that are active in precisely this area hard.

Swiss XR developers and Corona

For example, at the VR/AR service provider Bandara as with other Swiss companies, budgets have been cut, says Daniel Gremli, co-founder of the company. In addition, many XR applications require a physical space, explains Philip Eggenberger, the Managing Director and Founder of Staay. For his clients, this space is mainly given during promotions or events, but these have been cancelled due to the pandemic. "Accordingly, we mainly suffer from the fact that the public never gets to see what we have created in the XR area," says Eggenberger.

At HEGIAS AG sounds similar, because an important part of distribution is missing: the trade fairs. "The year went well for us at the beginning. We were able to launch HEGIAS 1.0 despite the lockdown. After that, however, we lacked the opportunities to show our solution to the broad masses in the real estate industry. In autumn, we tried to compensate for all the cancelled trade fairs with a creative solution - by opening the first VR pop-up store in Hamburg and then in Munich. But due to the increasingly strict measures, this was no longer possible at some point," says Patrik Marty, CEO of HEGIAS.

Corona boom to balance

At the same time, many companies also felt the Corona boom. On the one hand, there was a lack of events to present projects, on the other hand, there were requests for projects that digitally replaced events and trade fairs. Bandara recorded additional enquiries in this area, because many companies were thinking about how they could present their products in the digital space, according to Gremli. Also Bitforge noticed a significant increase in this area, says Reto Senn, Head of AR Products and Partner of the company.

AHEGIAS AG also says that many new clients have been looking for a solution that allows them to organise remote collaboration meetings and conduct site visits with clients despite social distancing and home offices. "HEGIAS VR is actually the perfect solution for the real estate industry in times of Corona," Marty says with conviction.

The digital agency Bitforge has also seen an increase in requests for AR solutions in the education, museum and e-commerce sectors. "AR projects are no longer just 'fun' prototypes, but have a clearly measurable benefit. In times when consumers are not supposed to go to the shops, they can, for example, place their products at home in AR," says Senn. In the meantime, you don't even need an app for that. In addition, interest in AR solutions in the industrial sector has increased. Here, the topics of remote maintenance and training in particular are attracting interest. "Even in times of travel bans and social distancing, instructions for service technicians and repairs have to be passed on as accurately as possible," explains Senn.

Patrick Minder, the CEO of the Lucerne Digital agency JLSsaw a Corona boom. This is because the crisis has led to a focussing of investments. "From our point of view, fewer augmented and virtual reality projects were initiated last year, but they were implemented all the more consistently and mostly more successfully," he says. The projects were much more oriented towards the needs of the users. For him, the digitalisation of events, augmented or virtual shopping experiences or augmented support processes gained in importance last year.

It seems that those who can persevere can expect success in the future.

Source: netzwoche / Interview with HEGIAS