What's the Business Case for Virtual Reality? Here's What the Experts Say.
Around here, we give a lot of thought to the question, "What is the business case for VR?"
Last week, I had a chance to attend VRX -- an annual virtual reality (VR) industry conference and expo, where I was able to hear insights and reflections on the state of VR -- and where it's going next. On day two, the focus shifted to this question.
We've written about success stories with this still-emerging, immersive technology -- about experiences that could make even the biggest VR skeptics a bit of envy, about what it was like when our own team had a chance to play around with a VR headset, and about potentially game-changing hardware.
And yet, the question for many still remains: How is VR really going to benefit me, my business, and my customers?
Here's what the experts have to say.
Removing Barriers and Distance
Anjney Midha is the co-founder & CEO of Ubiquity6: an augmented reality (AR) platform with a mission to build experiences that bring people together in an immersive (albeit digital) way.
And when it comes to making the case for AR or VR, he said at VRX, the emphasis should be on an experience "that doesn't isolate you [and] allows you to interact with the world and people around you."
It's something that Midha said occurred to him when he become a student in the U.S. after growing up overseas. Now, that distance is one of the most compelling points in the case for VR: to remove barriers and distance between friends, family, and colleagues.
"Can you bring the people I care about," he asked, "into the spaces I care about?"
As a growing number of workplaces are adapting to remote employees, the idea of building a virtual workforce becomes more prevalent -- of creating an immersively digital environment where those who work elsewhere can meet and collaborate with colleagues in a way that makes it feel like they're in the same room.
"The jump from conference calls to video conference calls was a huge leap that allowed us to pick up so much context from watching someone's facial expressions, but video conferencing has struggled to scale that interaction," says HubSpot Senior Marketing Manager Janessa Lantz, who's also a fully remote employee. "Where I see the potential for VR to impact my day-to-day would be to make large meetings more closely mimic real life."
That more natural approach to conversation and collaboration could be one thing that allows for a more immersive, virtual workplace.
"It's nearly impossible to run a good meeting with a big group of people on a video call," Lantz says. "The audio makes conversation awkward and you lose so much relational context by not physically sharing space."
It's that idea of a more immersive, virtual community that feels more natural -- whether professional or recreational -- that many businesses within the VR industry, like Facebook-owned Oculus, see as an end goal.
"We're all really interested to see how Oculus Quest changes not only how people play games and people build games," Allison Berliner -- a product marketing manager for the Oculus Quest -- told me at Oculus Connect earlier this year, "but also how people learn and communicate, and connect with each other."
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