AR and VR in SMEs: which use cases really work today

A mechanical engineering company in the Rosenheim area changed its safety induction for new employees last year. Instead of a slide presentation followed by a walk-through at the plant: a 20-minute VR sequence in which the critical hazard points become directly experienceable on a digital twin of the production line. Not as a replacement for the real induction — but as preparation that has measurably improved attention and retention rates. The time for the subsequent on-site induction fell from 90 to 35 minutes.

That is not a research project. That is the SME world in Bavaria, 2025.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been heralded for years as "technologies of the future" — and are still considered too complex, too expensive, too experimental at many companies. That is true for the wrong application. For the right one, it has not been true for some time.

What AR and VR concretely deliver in everyday operations

The decisive difference between AR and VR: Virtual Reality replaces the environment completely — the user wears a headset and is inside a digital world. Augmented Reality overlays digital information onto the real world — through a tablet, smart glasses, or the smartphone display.

For SMEs this leads to two very different fields of application:

VR is strong where physical risks or high costs limit real practice: safety inductions, machine operation, emergency scenarios. The Microsoft HoloLens 2 ecosystem and Meta Quest 3 have brought hardware prices into a range that yields a viable investment calculation for businesses with 30 employees and up.

AR is strong where information is missing at the right time at the right place: a service technician at a compressor sees the wiring diagram superimposed directly above the component via the tablet camera. A field service employee documents damage on site with automatically enriched metadata. An installer receives step-by-step instructions directly in their field of view.

Three fields of application that work for Bavarian SMEs today

Training and onboarding is the easiest entry point. A VR training sequence produced once can be reused as often as desired, is consistent in quality, and automatically documents proof of training. For companies with high turnover or regular mandatory instructions (occupational safety, hazardous goods, machine operation), this typically pays back within 12 to 18 months.

Remote maintenance and service is the field with the fastest return in practice. Instead of sending a technician 200 kilometres to the customer, the expert joins via AR session — the customer holds their tablet or smartphone over the equipment, the technician sees the same view and can superimpose markers, arrows or instructions directly. Travel time disappears. We use this ourselves with customers across distributed sites when fast diagnosis is required.

Planning and visualisation is, especially for the Loxone environment, an underestimated benefit. Before a building is renovated or a new lighting control is installed, owners can see via AR overlay how button systems, ceiling panels and distribution would look in their concrete room — on their own floor plan, in their own ceiling structure. Planning changes happen before the first action, not after the third.

What introduction costs in practice

The most common miscalculation: VR projects are compared with the cost of game development. That is wrong. A focused industrial use case — a training sequence of 15 to 20 minutes, no open game world — today costs between 8,000 and 25,000 euros to develop, depending on complexity and whether 3D models of the machines already exist.

Hardware: a Meta Quest 3 costs around 550 euros. For five devices plus management software, you are below 4,000 euros.

AR apps for service technicians on standard smartphones do not require dedicated hardware. The investment lies entirely in the development of the app — and that, when the use case is clear, can be in production within six to eight weeks.

The point we regularly make in advisory conversations: AR and VR are not standalone strategy projects. They are tools for concrete problems. Anyone who first defines the problem — too long onboarding times, too high travel costs in service, too many planning corrections on the construction site — and then checks whether AR or VR solves this problem more efficiently than the previous method, almost always lands on a clear basis for decision.

Anyone who wants to examine concrete use cases from their own operation can do so as part of our IT consulting and digitalisation support — or directly via our software and app development team if a prototype is to be built.

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