Impact of XR-Enabled Collaboration in Businesses—An Economic, Ecological, and Social Perspective

With increasing computing power and hardware diffusion, the number of possible use cases for Extended Reality (XR) in the business environment is increasing. Not least, due to globalization, the relevance of new forms of collaboration have furthermore gained relevance. This paper, therefore, investigates which different forms of collaboration are enabled with XR technologies and how they affect businesses. Various XR-enabled collaboration forms are demonstrated by distinguishing between synchronous, asynchronous, spatially co-located, and spatially separated XR collaboration. The impact of these new collaboration forms is then analyzed from a sustainability perspective, i.e., economic, ecological, and social. The analysis leads to five value dimensions illustrating the value-adding impact of XR-enabled collaboration on business activities. A subsequent discussion on concrete application scenarios from science demonstrates the value-adding potential in these dimensions and shows the limits of XR-enabled collaboration.