GEC NEWS WIREVirtual reality as a concept and technology has tasted a decent amount of success in industry like gaming, education and retail. How do you see the flow of VR in the enterprise space and other sectors?
Virtual reality, like most forms of emerging technology, is bound not by potential but by imagination. For the longest time, the gaming industry was the only one benefitting from the incredible experiences offered in virtual reality. While it was slow and confined, the growth of VR has now reached the scalable threshold where the cost of development is on par, and even an immense bargain in comparison with the return on investment for SMEs and big MNCs.
VR design, modelling, training, safety inductions, sales tools and holographic meetings are few use cases that would greatly benefit corporations and enterprises in enhancing their product offerings, improving efficiency in management and enhancing their general workflow.
Holographic meetings are considered to be one of the greatest benefits that AR/VR will give to enterprises. Are we ready in the back-end for such a step?
To be honest, the back-end is waiting for VR to catch up. Current conference and meeting room solutions provide an incredible array of features including wireless screen share, collaborative digital workspaces across multiple platforms and devices, document management systems, infra-red tracking, ultra-sonic tracking, voice-recognition, virtual assistants, data analytics and visualisation dashboards.
When it comes to the future of conference and meeting rooms, VR will actually just be a spoke on a much bigger, incredibly exciting wheel.
From trial rooms in shopping malls to meeting rooms in offices, VR will somewhat eradicate the existence of those very soon. Will it impact the physical/ brick and mortar models?
Not really – VR serves as a prelude to your prospective clients. The idea, currently anyway, is not to replace tangible elements with digital offerings, but rather use it to drive interest, spark curiosity and increase conversions from leads to proposals.
For example, instead of shoppers trying 10 different clothes to find the best colours that go together, they would now plan their outfit in VR and then try out the one outfit to check the fitting. Not only you invite shoppers to spend less time deliberating, as a corollary effect you increase sales and conversions and reduce overheads incurred from multiple trials.
Often technology is viewed as at the pinpoint of one extreme. It is not necessary to completely replace brick-and-mortar systems, but rather we should all explore the possibilities of integrating the two to create solutions that would be convenient for people with diverse proclivities.
‘Standalone’ virtual reality is the buzzword of 2018. How can this enhance the flavor the experience and how enterprises can benefit of a headset sans any other device?
A fantastic development in the sphere, and definitely the impetus VR required. Earlier, you either needed a mobile to run the headset which compromised on the quality of the experience and created problems of longevity, battery, processor congestion and memory storage. The high-end headsets needed a gaming PC and area-tracking sensors.
These were huge obstacles in creating use cases and scalability of this technology. With standalone headsets, you now have an independent device capable of delivering premium content with limited dependencies. This has driven down the cost, driven up the quality and also driven up the amount of use cases.
Real or surreal? How do you see the future of VR?
We’ve already had our infatuation with surrealism in VR – that’s how it exploded onto the scene. In present times, I think VR is coming more in terms with reality – the applications are now being developed for actual use cases that would benefit independent users or corporations.
While there is a massive market for surrealism in VR, it would be the applications grounded in the reality that will really drive the scalability.
