As the fourth industrial revolution has been rising, and with the advancement of technology, business models and structures have changed, technology startups are receiving attention as playing an important role in jobs and innovation. A drastic innovation that could lead to job changes is one of the essential motivations for technology startups. In the recent industrial revolution, technological innovation has caused job changes, and the concern about the relationship between innovation and employment has been taken into account. This concern is that to achieve sustainability and sustainable socio-economic growth, it is essential to balance technological innovation’s macroeconomic benefits with job changes’ micro satisfaction. There are also concerns about job changes through technological innovation in that high and advanced technology, such as AI and the IoT, can replace both our physical and intellectual labor.
Technology is vibrant. It deviates and improves constantly. New changes and new options are stubbornly emerging. Changing technology is universal. Technology in the scenario does not seem short of any change. With the substructure to crop and allocate them, new technologies appear at once. The car also needed petrol pumps for the highways. Through fiber infrastructure, the Internet has progressed. However, that technological interdependence implies that immense differences are slow and exclusive. In addition to the personal computer, the initial five evidence technology rollers of Defense, Combined Circuits, Social Media, the Internet, have melodramatically transformed culture.
Artificial intelligence (1), self-driving cars (2), robotics (3), and virtual reality are just constraints on the next trend of the dissolute imminent societal transformational technologies. All these technologies foreshadow a future with increases in efficiency and wealth that are excessive. But among all these different topics, Virtual reality and all reality-based concepts have emerged to be of public consumer interest. VR and AR have established the future of the viewing experience, and startups are adhering to the changing patterns. With Oculus and other devices, we observe a new era for how technology will be driven by startups more than the corporates that believe in red-tapism. The red-tapism is why one doesn’t see bigger changes in technology, but startups are something different. They know to expand those risky wings and take them from foe to friend, and that is why the startup sector today is an uncontrollable nuclear bomb that is set to explode soon throughout the consumer mind (4).
The reality with the startup sector
More Indian tech startups have been ‘born global’ and expanded internationally in the last five years of the 2010s than at any other time in history. This was accompanied by a trademark shift in India’s historical founding mentality and scaling outside to one. Even in the early rounds of funding, global expansion is part of the business plan. Liquidity and access to information from such a global ecosystem have provided an atmosphere in which many founders think globally, even in the early days of product development (5). Historically, companies have faced the two-fold challenge of optimizing the pressure to lower costs while facilitating sufficient local adaptation while pursuing an international corporate strategy. In terms of primary geography of emphasis, determination of potential customers and positioning strategies, allocating resources, customer experience value offerings, marketing strategy, and developing a business model, senior management should make crucial decisions. It is necessary to decide geography from source to cost incurred (6).
Given that technology startups have always been simple given the rapid growth they are beginning to experience, trying to ensure the efficient use of in-house assets to increase the probability of winning is also more important than ever. One of the big issues that startup stakeholders used to ask in the formative days of the last decade was whether Indian tech companies scale, validated by the foray of Indian tech entrepreneurship to foreign markets today. These tech startups have not only grown strongly in India by leveraging favorable demographics and strong GDP or investment growth but today, our companies have also created a positive feedback loop of repetitive innovators who may be more skilled and wiser to make bold bets successfully, such as multi-country expansion simultaneously (7).
Startups are slowly adapting to the technology growth in the sector. Over the years, we have seen major companies come up. These companies don’t exist without their formative days as tart-ups that would have had innovative ideas. The use and application of technology are what the world needs today, and with the red-tapism attitude of corporates, only startups are the ones who can elevate these to any new level. Now, technology is evolving, and the consumer demands a more different view of it. That is what systems like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual reality, Augmented reality; Robotic process automation is slowly rising in demand.
Systems like Virtual reality have been taking shape ever since. In 2016, Samsung partnered with Oculus to expand its products to all users to purchase the Samsung S7 in India (8). The sales rose, and many got a chance to experience the world within the device. With exciting theatrical features, the virtual reality concept is surely taking investors by storm, and every now, and the startups with such technology are given better funding. Virtual reality has been there as the silent killer of the media scale event and will be the preference of what change of media consumption could be in the following years. Imagine Cinemas going out for this, a consumer experiencing a movie through the device; this could be an alternative to the pandemic event we are currently facing.
Augmented reality is a different concept here, nothing equal as compared to virtual reality. Augmented reality gives you the experience of experiencing the world around you and seeing structure as similar as they are in front of you or standing in front of you. The AR experience is a different thing. Games like Pokemon go were the first to implement this to their AR concept game, where you could catch a pokemon in your garden or on the road. This was the real reason as to why it blew up. Similarly, the AR experience also rose with measuring scales used through apps to obtain accurate measurements like height, distance, and many other metrics (9).
Virtual reality in Startups
In this space, the high penetration of smartphones combined with rising product launches, e.g., Google’s Daydream VR, has done well to garner consumers’ interest in this new technology. It is important to know that there have been no Virtual reality device companies in India. However, a growing list of entrepreneurs is building software applications that offer platform services to their customers utilizing hardware from global device makers like SmartVizX using Oculus headsets for creating virtual environments and Infurnia providing virtual environment development tools for interior designers. India has approximately 70 Virtual Reality startups, and only a handful of businesses have raised any seed/angel stage capital from venture funds (10).
India needs to catch up with the region’s other mature economies that see significant AR & VR adoption growth. For instance, China’s VR market will be 8.5 billion dollars by 2020, according to the 2016 Bloomberg report, and it noted that there are 200 plus VR industry startups in China. In-store technology suppliers for furniture retailers, virtual fitting trials in offline shopping spaces, manufacturing and real estate applications, and even end-consumer offers integrated with cycling equipment are examples of virtual reality applications in the Indian market. One such test is the Hyderabad-based Startup, LoopReality, which creates LoopFit using indoor cycling, virtual reality, and IoT (11). The company provides a fully immersive cycling experience that synchronizes with all wearable devices that track the vital aspects. In partnership with HP, VR lounges are opening up at PVR cinemas to provide moviegoers with experience. They provide a library of immersive and interactive, fascinating content curated around genres such as drama, science fiction, horror, action, among others. Among the growth barriers of virtual reality in India are the absence of content creators of virtual reality, access to content creation technology, and consumer awareness.
Market opportunities for VR
Market research suggests that by 2020, virtual reality will be worth over 15 billion dollars. The current market is driven by hardware from Oculus, Samsung, and Sony, even though software and software will be necessary to maintain attention and business growth. In both the USA and Europe, business models such as VR hardware, high-end and mobile-enabled devices experience high growth levels. Several VR content creation companies that use the VR devices released for testing and development by Oculus, Sony, and other companies are entering the market. Companies like Google, Samsung, Sony, and Microsoft are strategizing for VR compatibility on their devices, which is expected to rise over the next six to seven years (12).
Augmented reality in Startups
The AR market is set to be 151 billion dollars by 2022 (13). By 2022, the hardware sector will be known to experience growth at a CAGR of almost 94 percent. In AR systems, there are three basic hardware parts: sensors, processors, and displays. Hardware innovations are expected to induce major future growth prospects for hardware equipment, such as the evolution of smart contact lenses and advanced AR processor-equipped HMDs.The rise of adoption across the e-commerce and retail space will spur global demand for augmented reality over the forecast period. AR offers retailers the opportunity to enhance the overall shopping experience by bringing an image, product label, or shopping window to life, greatly enhancing the degree of interaction between customers and products (13).
Geographical distribution of demand indicates that Europe is projected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 75 percent over the forecast period and will be driven. Increased investment in countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. China is considered a significant contributor within the Asia Pacific region, increasing AR devices and software investments and regional growth. The increase in smartphone usage is currently driving China’s AR market. The technology has been invested in by local suppliers such as Renren, Tencent, and Baidu.
As several large companies from various verticals are beginning to harness AR and VR’s power to enhance the customer experience they offer, the future for Augmented Reality looks promising. For its mobile application, Axis bank uses AR. In a virtual overlay of the car’s features, car manufacturer Renault utilized VR to showcase its new hatchback. Through virtual reality, Tata Motors introduced its car Tiago. It featured a Do-It-Yourself VR headset, carried in select newspaper editions, giving consumers a basic level feel of the car. And, for Amazon India Fashion Week, fashion brand Maybelline created a 360-degree film (14).
Market opportunities for AR
In comparison with virtual reality, augmented reality has high growth potential. In contrast to the completely immersive experience of VR, AR allows the user to see the surroundings when an AR headset is worn or when using an AR mobile app. With a digital overlay of information, the physical environment is augmented, enabling users to continue daily operations with improved surroundings.
