Overview of immersive experiences – Addressing the Requirements of Immersive Experiences with AWS
The ability to deliver high-quality immersive experiences has become a more common expectation across various domains, ranging from gaming and entertainment to professional training and simulation. As the technology underlying these experiences enters its third generation, user demand is rapidly increasing. These applications demand a cohesive integration of visual, auditory, and interactive elements to simulate environments that users find engaging yet simple to adopt.
Building such shared virtual worlds requires significant computing power, low-latency communication, and high-speed storage. Furthermore, development and management tools that can quickly adapt to the new dimensions such applications introduce are needed.
This chapter underscores how AWS plays an instrumental role in meeting the demands of such use cases. We will review how AWS services support robust, scalable, and secure solutions that drive innovation and engagement while minimizing upfront capital investment.
We will cover the following topics:
Overview of immersive experiences
Online gaming
Connected workers
Workforce development and training
Augmented reality-enhanced sporting events
Overview of immersive experiences
The term immersive experiences, sometimes referred to as XR, encompasses Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) use cases. These offer varying levels of immersion and are supported by different underlying technologies and architectural patterns. Such immersive experiences take place in the context of a virtual world, which could be running for the benefit of a single user or shared by dozens or hundreds of users.
The term metaverse refers to a future state where these isolated virtual worlds are interconnected into a new worldwide entity. This is analogous to how the internet joined together what were once isolated networks. It became its own overarching entity that no individual or corporation can own, yet is viewed as a single thing in a logical sense. Your ISP sells you internet access, and you expect to be able to access the same things around the world, regardless of who your ISP is. The idea is that, in the future, people will connect to the metaverse, have access to a common set of XR services, and be able to interact with anyone else, regardless of the device or platform they use to connect.
Whether or not this vision plays out in exactly that way, one thing is for certain: XR has become a huge market – and consumers are expecting these kinds of services more and more every day. Worldwide, the XR market is $64 billion (USD), with a combined annual growth rate of 43.5%. This means the market is expected to be over $600 billion in 20281.
1 Extended Reality (XR) Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2023-2028 [https://www.imarcgroup.com/extended-reality-market].