Virtual Reality and the Future of Business
How Your Startup Can Take Advantage of the VR Revolution
Virtual reality is quickly becoming the hottest thing in startups since we started carrying supercomputers in our pockets. As mobile and SaaS companies take down rounds just to keep themselves afloat, venture capitalists are pouring cash into VR. Every week you hear of another VR company raising millions with plans to disrupt an industry through 3D immersion. VR productivity tools! VR advertising! VR analytics! Just throw VR in front of your business idea and let the investors come to you.
This is an incredible time in the VR industry, much like the early days of mobile. With all the hype around VR, everyone and their mother wants to get in on the ground floor of the coming VR revolution. The only problem is that many people don’t seem to understand exactly what makes VR a revolution.
Like every previous tech revolution, VR will only change the world through the ways it can provide tangible value to people and businesses. The most obvious is of course through entertainment, whether it’s playing games, watching 360 videos, or attending sports games. But VR also has enormous potential to improve the way we work.
The reason why VR is called a “paradigm shift in human-computer interaction” is because it allows us to interact with the digital world in 3D as opposed to the 2D screens we use now. The best business applications of virtual reality will make full use of that 3D environment to impress, interact, and communicate like never before. If a VR startup wants to survive and thrive in the VR Gold Rush that is just beginning, it needs to take advantage of these unique properties of virtual reality to provide real value to real people.
Mind Blown
Anyone that’s tried a good virtual reality experience usually walks away with one distinct feeling — Wow! That wow factor is probably the thing that has driven the virtual reality revolution more than anything else. Especially in the early days of VR, people are simply blown away by the ability of this magical little headset to transport you to mythical realms, the outer reaches space, or even just a roller coaster ride.
More than anything else, businesses have capitalized on this use of virtual reality. From the original HBO marketing experience that took you to the top of The Wall in Game of Thrones to the dozens of 360 videos showing off the latest high-end car models we have today, companies have realized that VR experiences elicit powerful emotions and therefore brand loyalty.
That’s because VR is totally unlike any previous media technology. The power of virtual reality comes from its ability to induce presence, or the feeling you get when your brain is convinced on a fundamental level that the virtual world is real. Unlike commercials or ads that we often tune out, VR brand experiences feel like lived experiences to the viewer. They remember them just like they were really there.
But it’s not just advertising in VR that can take advantage of the power of presence. VR journalism works the same way. The reason why Clouds Over Sidra or the New York Times VR app are so popular (besides giving away a million Cardboard headsets), is that they can transport you to faraway locations and help you empathize with the subject matter in ways we’ve never seen before.
It never fails to impress me that even after two years of working in the virtual reality industry I still find VR experiences that can blow my mind. One day I’ll be flying around the top of an active volcano and the next I’ll be courtside at a March Madness Final Four game. Startups that want to succeed in the virtual reality revolution should take full advantage of this ability to create truly impressive and memorable experiences. But often it’s not just about putting someone in an incredible virtual environment — it’s about what you can do while you’re there.
Interaction — In the Third Dimension!
Virtual reality is a game changer as far as how we interact with 3D environments. For years, we’ve been limited to 2D desktops for everything from 3D modelling to complex training scenarios. Virtual reality allows us to finally reach inside the 3D environment and manipulate it naturally.
The most obvious applications for 3D interaction have therefore been in the design department. Unreal recently released a teaser of a VR content creator that will allow people to design VR games in VR. Architects have increasingly been incorporating virtual reality into their workflow, from design to testing to showing plans to clients. 3D modellers have been experimenting with ways to use Blender in virtual reality. Even artists have taken to VR, creating fantastical works in Medium and Tilt Brush.
But 3D interaction can also be used to get new insights from existing information. Being able to walk around in a 3D environment is used in the real estate market to show off properties to potential buyers across the country. We’ve even seen a number of interesting 3D data visualizations that allow researchers to look at and understand data in new ways.
Perhaps one of the most powerful business applications of virtual reality is in training. Prior to VR, training seminars were usually highly abstract and impersonal involving slide decks and instructors that would drone on and on. In VR, we can create experiences specifically designed to recreate the exact scenario you’re training for. We’ve already seen this in everything from diversity training to surgery. And the best part is that companies can do this training entirely remotely, reducing travel time and expenses.
3D interaction is perhaps the element that makes virtual reality most different from traditional computing. VR startups that effectively make use of 3D space provide a significant advantage over their 2D competitors in ways that they can’t begin to match. And interacting with the 3D world becomes even more powerful when you can also interact with other people.
Virtual Communications
Talking with another person in a virtual environment is unlike any previous method of digital communication. In every other communication technology from the telegraph to Skype, there was always an intermediary that kept it from feeling like a face-to-face conversation. Even videoconferencing, as good as it is, still feels like you’re talking to a screen. But through the power of presence, talking to someone in VR feels like talking to someone in the same room.
Essentially, because the virtual reality headset makes your brain believe the simulation is real, it also believes all the places, things, and even people in that simulation are real too. And when those people act and sound like real people through the power of motion capture and 3D audio, it feels exactly like you’re talking and interacting with that person face-to-face. This is called social VR and will eliminate distance as a factor in communications.
So far, social VR is mostly being used by consumers to watch movies, play games, and hang out with people all over the world. But this technology has tremendous potential in education and business. Immersive VR Education recently teased their Lecture VR platform for an immersive, multi-user education environment that could allow people around the world to learn together. At Agora VR, we’re using social VR to create marketing presentations, training seminars, and direct sales tools that companies can use to connect with employees and potential customers. By using social VR, companies no longer have to rely on Webinars that often act simply as one-way information dumps in order to share ideas with people around the world.
But these applications are just the beginning for social VR. As the graphics get closer to photorealism, it will begin to replace videoconferencing as the main way businesses communicate across distances. Everything from interviews to meetings can and will be conducted in virtual reality. As the capabilities of virtual reality progress, we’ll see the emergence of entirely virtual offices where employees can work together with colleagues on multiple continents. Social VR won’t just make our world smaller. It will make it the size of our living rooms.
Of course, it’s still early days for virtual reality so startups need to find applications that take advantage of the capabilities that VR has to offer right now. The most effective business applications of virtual reality will combine the ability of VR to communicate naturally, interact in 3D, and blow people’s minds. Startups that mix the perfect cocktail of these three elements will set themselves apart from software that uses traditional 2D computing in a way that makes it impossible to compete. That’s how you create the VR revolution that everyone’s talking about and turn virtual reality from a fun media device into the future of computing.
Matthias McCoy-Thompson is a co-founder and COO of AgoraVR. We create tools for companies, organizations, and individuals to present and share their ideas in virtual reality.
