The VAM Realities project carried out an online survey on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) in European manufacturing SMEs between April 2020 and October 2020. We are currently finalizing a report based on this survey (and numerous interviews), but we wanted to give a small sneak peek on these results before the complete report is published.

The survey had 255 respondents from all over Europe across various manufacturing industries. We asked three similar questions on AR and VR related to how aware organizations are of their potential, how much they are currently used and whether they feel there are significant limitations to using them in their organizations. The results for AR and VR are shown here side by side for easy comparison.

As we can see in the first figure, the majority of the respondents said they were already aware of the potential of these technologies. However, a sizable minority were still unfamiliar with the potential of AR and VR.  The responses were remarkably similar across both technologies. This is somewhat to be expected as AR and VR are often talked about at the same time and the umbrella term Extended Reality (XR) has also been recently introduced to refer to these technologies.

From the second figure we can see that a clear majority of the surveyed organizations were still not using AR or VR at all. Still, a sizable portion of the respondents were already using these technologies sometimes or very often. Pioneering and innovative organizations are currently figuring out the best ways to utilize these technologies and it is possible that others will soon have to follow to stay competitive. Again, both AR and VR elicited very similar responses with VR edging out AR slightly in the frequent use categories.

We also asked the respondents to evaluate whether they see significant limitations in using these technologies in their organization. This time the answers followed a more even distribution as can be seen in the last figure. Nevertheless, a slight majority felt there were many limitations in using AR or VR in their company. The degree of difficulty associated with using AR and VR were yet again very comparable.

The upcoming survey report will go into more detail on the specific use cases of AR and VR as well as their adoption barriers and possible ways to overcome them. The report will be published in the very near future so stay tuned!