Five Ways VR Will Impact Your Life
With over 52 million VR headsets predicted to be sold in America over the next year, how will it impact our lives? We asked Second Home member Henry Stuart, the CEO of Visualise, a company that specialises in telling stories through the medium of VR.
1) VR headsets can’t compete with human eyes… yet
It’s a while off before we can get to the Matrix. To be able to see vision like we do now, you need to have 16k per eye on the VR headset. Right now it’s maybe 2k. The idea of having a 16k TV screen squashed down per eye is going to be in ten years time. So it’s a long way before we have that lucid reality view of looking around. There’s always going to be that knowledge in the back of your head that it’s not quite right, but that’s going to change obviously.
2) Laser scanners
The real excitement is the crossover between two technologies like room scanning — where you can get a perfect model of the real world by capturing it with thousands of photos from every different angle and every different object — and photogrammetry — putting laser scanners down and recreating from millions of dots the exact world — and then exploring those perfectly captured places by walking around. Those types of technologies are all stuff that we’re starting to get excited about.
3) Augmented reality will explode
VR is meant to be worth $20bn by 2020, AR is meant to be $100bn. AR is the industry that’s going to go bananas because it’s got an immediate application for every part of our daily life, as opposed to something you might tap out and into for practical or entertainment reason. Augmented Reality is information overlaid making the world more rich, more informative, more useful and making you more efficient in a lot of ways. With business applications and life applications — it’s basically going to replace the smartphone eventually, because you won’t need to reference them. First of all it may be a pair of glasses, then it will evolve into the contact lens, whatever it is. I think it will become a lot more invasive and interesting, and I think actually that’s a much more frightening thing.
4) VR will benefit your health and job
VR will impact everything from the construction industry to health care. Imagine a construction project where engineers from all over the world are able to collaborate, draw shapes on the road about where they think cranes are going to be deployed, move forwards or backwards in time to see what the construction will look like at a certain point. VR recreates virtual worlds to deal with post traumatic stress by putting people in them, who then explain “that wasn’t quite right, I think there was someone there, or closer. And then the bomb goes off there…” or whatever it is. You can use VR to help take away pain in patients with burns. They’ve made these ice worlds that they put people in so when they’re having treatment on their burns what they can see is this very fun, cartoony ice world.
5) VR will change our view of the physical world
There’s a huge amount of positives from VR, like school kids seeing nearly extinct animals, and tourism that doesn’t endanger the planet. People will go into VR for these kinds of kicks: wind suit diving, you can just put a headset on and do it. Sit with friends and be at the court side of Wimbledon and all these incredible things just like you were there. Life’s going to be different. There’s going to be experiences in the VR world that are just going to be so much richer than anything we could ever get in the real world. We could be face to face with dinosaurs. Imagine that?
Read our in-depth interview with Henry Stuart here
Second Home is a creative workspace and cultural venue, bringing together diverse industries, disciplines and social businesses. Find out more about joining us here: secondhome.io
