Thursday, 24 December, 2020 UTC
Summary
Securing funding for XR projects remains a key challenge for developers around the world. We recently shared best practices and general tips from HTC vice president, Pearly Chen, and from Keita Funakawa, COO of Nanome. In the spirit of collaboration and insights sharing, we went straight to the source to continue this important conversation.
We sat down with Wallon Walusayi, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at 3Data, a VIVE X company tapping into big data to help companies operate more efficiently. 3Data found traction in the synchronized view of all its real-time data through its Data Fusion platform, and starting in IT Operations and Security, the company’s technology has quickly proven to be valuable across multiple industries such as Logistics and Supply Chain, Cloud Operations, and IoT Management.
According to Walusayi, aside from funding support, benefits of being a VIVE X company in bringing your content to market includes access to a team leading premium VR experiences, which has enabled 3Data to harness the full power of high-fidelity XR displays and push the limits of how businesses will interact and harmonize with data in a new and intuitive human-centric way.
What was the top challenge you experienced related to funding your VR project and how did you overcome it?
In a single word: education. More specifically, education on the ROI of the project. When fundraising for our WebXR project, we underestimated the amount of education that would be required to communicate the fundamental ROI from stereoscopic 3D visualizations, as well as the additional benefits of interactive immersive collaboration.
What one piece of advice would you give to developers looking for investors/funders for their projects?
I would advise developers to focus on the ROI of their applications and the bottom-line impact for the business. XR is still very new and proof points are necessary to quantify the real value for end-users and encourage companies to adopt new XR technology. One thing I also wish I knew when I first started developing VR solutions was how important 2D cross-platform functionality is to bridge the gap for companies to adopt new XR technologies.
Many developers face investors/funders/other stakeholders that are often concerned that VR projects won’t pay off. How were you able to secure buy-in from your key stakeholders?
3Data was able to secure buy-in from our investors and early stakeholders through the relentless pursuit of product-market fit and early adopter customer testimonials. We developed our platform in correlation with customer feedback and proved our value through industry use cases. My advice is to develop a prototype, collect feedback, and quantify the value by iterating on your sales process.
What needs to be done to drive more industry/vertical buy-in for VR solutions?
While there are many factors to consider when thinking about industry buy-in and XR adoption, two important factors stand out. The first is lowering the barrier to entry for proof of concepts by creating easy ways for developers to integrate with existing IAM systems, such as Active Directory. Secondly, there needs to be a ubiquitous process for turnkey XR solutions for specific business units to easily pick up XR devices and immediately understand the use case and benefit.
Stay tuned for more insights in upcoming developer Q&As and in the meantime, be sure to join us on our Developer Community Forums.
The post Developer Conversations: Funding Insights from 3Data appeared first on VIVE Blog.