Enterprise VR: Applications

Horst Werner
7 min readApr 29, 2022

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The last post shed some light on the unique strengths of spatial work UIs. But with every exciting new technology, the crucial question is: Who is going to pay for it and why?

Let’s first look at the “why”. The first applications to use spatial work environments are likely those benefiting most of these unique capabilities:

  • Using location as intuitive navigation framework
  • Representing complex non-aggregated data as tangible objects
  • Subconscious tracking of what’s happening in the background
  • Natural representation of different angles of view
  • Ability to interact with avatars in a spatial context

The most obvious application is using immersive, location-based navigation with content that is natively spatial, such as digital twins of real-world objects, venues and systems. This encompasses simulations, training, virtual showrooms and monitoring.

Other applications will use synthetic 3D content (as in the image above) to allow users to locate information quickly, to observe complex systems or track processes, and to analyze complex data more efficiently.

And then, of course, there is the real-time communication and collaboration between increasingly geographically distributed workers in spatial environments, although this will most likely be an additional benefit rather than the primary purpose of a work-oriented application.

Let’s have a closer look at some of the potential horizontal (cross-industry) and vertical (industry specific) applications.

Horizontal Applications

Developing a horizontal application is much more attractive than a vertical solution, because such applications require less investment to build and have potentially a much larger customer base. But the lack of industry-specific content, which makes such applications so much easier to build, also makes it much harder to come up with a compelling value proposition.

The following applications fall into this category:

VR real-time communication and collaboration.

About a dozen companies, including the heavyweight Meta, offer virtual spaces to meet, chat and share virtual screens. But none of them has achieved product-market fit so far.

Having only people and no content in collaboration spaces is apparently not enough to compete against established 2D video conferencing, especially considering how poorly current avatars represent real persons. This particular disadvantage may be mitigated with the adoption of hardware to convey people’s facial expressions in VR or even create real holograms.

Enriching these virtual spaces with carefully prepared and arranged 3D content, e.g. for virtual town hall meetings or fairs, will make them much more enticing. A promising variant of that would be a fully virtual Executive Briefing Center. However, leaving the significant investment to create the required content to the customers is not going to help adoption.

Personal Productivity

Evernote has built a successful business on keeping and organizing all the little information snippets we need to remember. Similarly, an application providing a spatial environment as basic navigation structure (instead of folder hierarchies), which successfully integrates documents and interactive 2D screens (virtual browser windows) with 3D representations generated from data can be an attractive solution for information workers who frequently have to switch between different work contexts.

In particular, visualizing incoming messages (e-mail, instant messages) in the locations associated with the corresponding work contexts can make a big difference as the relative spatial distance to the current work context (and thus rendered size) correlates with the relative relevance.

Knowledge Management and Enterprise Portals

While Google search works really well most of the time, search in enterprise’s intranets and document management systems/wikis is usually much inferior, mostly because these systems are bad at judging relevance. Often the context of search results is not sufficiently clear and we waste a lot of time inspecting irrelevant search results.

As far as hierarchical navigation is concerned, folder or page hierarchies have always suffered from the problem that going down the wrong branch of the tree at one point makes it impossible to actually find the desired information without backtracking.

A well-designed spatial navigation framework can solve that problem. The ability to overlook the whole map at once, combined with the mental associations that people have with well-known objects can intuitively guide the user to the places where the desired information is found. This works particularly well when a user looks for something they’ve seen before.

Advanced Analytics

While conventional dashboards and reports answer pre-known questions by aggregating huge amounts of data into very few numbers and simple charts, advanced analytics aim at interrogating complex data to tease out information that is hidden beneath the aggregations and that users often didn’t even know how to ask for.

This capability is usually required in the troubleshooting of complex systems, fraud detection, enterprise and public security. The two main challenges there are that users have to deal with the full complexity of the data and that there is no straightforward process — it involves much backtracking and forking off from previous results.

A spatial work environment can help by

  • visualizing complex, multi-dimensional, data in a way that takes advantage of our highly efficient, unconscious, pattern recognition capabilities
  • providing intuitive metaphors for navigating and manipulating the spatial data representations
  • providing a stable spatial context in which data sources, tools and intermediate results can be placed and efficiently accessed when needed

Vertical Applications.

Most industry-specific applications require a big upfront investment in either the production or specific content or the implementation of connectivity to established data sources. However, all of the following applications seem to be viable due to the high value they provide, even if some are niche products.

Some of them will benefit from being integrated into a general-purpose VR work platform, but given the narrow markets, none of them appears to be able to attract a sufficiently large user base to become the seed of such a platform.

The obvious applications, by virtue of working with natively spatial content, are:

Training

Pilots have been trained in physical flight simulators since the 1930s. With VR, training simulations for many more activities have become possible. Examples are car assembly, package logistics, operation and maintenance of offshore drilling rigs and wind turbines and even surgery.

All these simulations are providing high value to a narrow market, in which the relatively high cost of producing the content is justified by the even higher cost or plain impossibility of training with the live system, and the potential damage caused by inadequate training.

Process Planning and Simulation

Closely related to the training use case is the planning and simulation of processes in production lines. Usually, digital models (from CAD) of the facilities and the products and their assembly structure are already at hand. Still the effort for creating the full-blown simulation of such a process is high. But it pales in comparison to the monetary impact of process optimization in the manufacturing industry. Point in case is the investment BMW made into a 3D production simulation:

Showrooms for High-Value Sales

This means showrooms with staff showing visitors around (since we focus on applications for work, virtual showrooms in the sense of a 3D web page are out of scope). They will allow customers to explore the exterior and interior of objects that are built to order, such as homes, large yachts and planets, while a sales representative supplies additional information. Given that the required models are already available and the volume of such sales is high, the adoption of virtual showrooms is highly likely.

Telemedicine and Remote Consultation

Telemedicine was one of the most compelling use cases in the “A Day Made of Glass 2” video, and it is getting closer to reality. The ability to enable a remote expert to give an opinion in a dialog supported by detailed, spatial imagery is invaluable, especially since AI can’t replace the human expertise so far.

Similar use cases exist in many other domains, especially where complex and very remote physical systems must be assessed. The required models can be created by means of 3D scanning, and probably even by processing video taken from ground-based or airborne drones.

System Modeling and Observation

Apart from the listed natively 3D verticals, there is also much potential in applications for observing of complex systems and tracking of processes, both in the world of software and in the physical world. It was no coincidence that a cityscape representation of a cloud system landscape was at the center of my POC for the .conf fair in 2019.

Similar synthetic structures can be devised for most complex systems in such a way that the user can easily grasp both their structure and their status. Interesting challenges in that space are understandable representations of complex projects (beating Jira there is a low bar) or even (holy grail!) whole enterprise knowledge graphs.

The spatial information architecture for such solutions is obviously fundamentally different from conventional applications, and this will be the topic of the next post.

In conclusion, we can already see numerous applications, both industry-specific and cross-industry, although the market is still in its infancy. It will be interesting to see which of them will gain traction, and which may emerge as setting the standard for a VR workplace.

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