Imagine this:
You are walking down the hallway on your way to your next meeting when you remember: You are on the wrong floor. You press a button and, in the blink of an eye, you find yourself in the meeting room. As you turn around, you can see your colleagues from around the globe. You gathered to listen to a presentation of the new upcoming prototype. And what awaits you? Another boring PowerPoint? Nah, that´s so 2010. Instead, your colleagues show you a holographic 3D model of their idea. You notice that a few mistakes were made in the engineering process; however, since it´s a virtual representation and no capital has been deployed for a physical prototype, it doesn’t matter. You just saved yourself a large sum of money. As the meeting is over, it´s time to jump into the next one, so you again walk out the door, into the hallway, press a button, and arrive just in time before the next pitch.
What sounds like a scenario from a TV-Show or the year 2050 is just another day in the world of doing business by using Virtual Reality. In our daily business, we can find ourselves in a world that embraces the future of technology and gets to see technological advancement everywhere we look. But for many people, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Virtual Reality is gaming, even though nowadays it is used in multiple areas and blends into our daily lives in many ways. For example, Virtual Reality is used a lot in medicine, education, and the military. But it also holds vast opportunities for your business, which is what we want to show you today.
Understand the basics – What is Virtual Reality?
Before analyzing the business opportunities, we want to give a clearer view of what VR actually is. Virtual Reality is a computer-generated environment in which the user gets the impression of being fully immersed with their surroundings. Scenes and objects appear to be real, and the physical world shut out. The settings can be anywhere from entirely similar to utterly different to the real world. For example, on an educational and medical level, it gives surgeons the opportunity to practice procedures. And even though this concept seems highly futuristic, its origin dates back to the 1950s, to a device called Sensorama, which was a machine built in a seat that played 3D-Movies and also generated vibrations and influenced senses like the sense of smell, to make the experience as vivid as possible. VR is also not to be confused with Augmented Reality. With VR, everything we see is artificially constructed and ultimately part of the simulation we are immersed in. This is not the case with AR. In AR, digital objects or images are placed in the real world, which holds a framework for such. This often happens through a camera on our smartphones, such as certain filters in the camera function on Social Media platforms. Digital elements are placed in the real environment. There however, is Mixed Reality, short MR, which combines AR and VR. In this case, the real-world and the artificial environment are similar, but digital objects can interact with the user. Back to VR, there are multiple devices to perceive the environment, variating in prices, quality and intensity of perception, and level of interaction. All of them include a headset. For starters, it is possible to dive into a VR experience with a smartphone put into a head mount as a relatively low-priced solution. But the intensity of perception and interaction level is limited due to the possible dimensions of freedom (DoF). Smartphone head mounts only allow for a 3-DoF experience: You can move your head and look around but can´t walk around freely in the environment. 6-DoF options will enable you to move up/down, left/right, and forward/backward combined with rotation about three perpendicular axes, mostly determined roll, yaw, and pitch. This creates an experience that doesn’t only allow the user to immerse into the artificial environment fully but also intensifies the perception of such and makes a higher level of interaction possible. 6-DoF can often be found in higher priced standalone headsets, which have their processors and therefore don’t require any consoles or computers. This makes standalone headsets more attractive, as they often feature a series of applications and a great experience in 6-DoF, but also 3DoF.
How VR could benefit your business
Covid-19 slowed the world down in many ways. But like fire lighting gasoline, it was an accelerant for innovation and digitalization within many companies. Businesses were forced to implement systems that would support remote work. And even though many people miss the social interactions that working at an office brings to the table, studies show that many employees want to keep on working remotely after Covid has passed. VR makes it possible to connect people from anywhere in the world. For instance, Virtual Reality meetings hold many opportunities to make virtual meetings more interesting, interactive, and efficient. In simple video calls, certain things simply cannot be done, like walking around a virtual room, interacting with other avatars behind which are people from across the globe, and utilizing 3D models- all of that in real-time. 6-DoF solutions make for a better experience, allowing the user to move in real life while being immersed in the VR experience. But there are also 3-DoF options available, which are often cheaper and, depending on the company’s needs, sufficient. Either way, the opportunities to fuel creative energy are endless and also simultaneously encourage innovation within your company from an entirely different angle. Emotions, visions, and strategy can be made visual using this technology- something that might not even be possible in person, for example, when it comes to holographic 3D models. It can also mean saving costs in office spaces and cutting budgets for business trips since the goal of VR-Meetings is to be equivalent to or even more beneficial than real-life interactions. And aside from the apparent benefit of branding yourself as an innovative, employee-oriented company, it would also mean working towards having a positive impact on the environment, since there would be less need for unnecessary business travels and fewer employees making daily trips to the office. Along with virtual meetings, companies already use VR to design products and undergo testing without physically producing them. For instance, a virtual model of a newly designed car cockpit can be experienced and tested in a VR environment before a single physical prototype was built. Feedback on these 3D prototypes can be generated earlier and faster, from anywhere and anyone in the world and alterations can be done much quicker. This doesn’t only save time and resources in the early stages of development but also in the overall production costs. A third use case of VR meetings already mentioned before is the virtual training of procedures. The same way a surgeon can train surgeries, various other scenarios are imaginable that enables experts to exercise their skills and interactions before and without the existence of a physical training object and location. This can save costs and time for training objects and traveling of experts, and it ensures a well-skilled staff from the very beginning.
So let´s talk about examples.
One application that is currently and Beta testing and holds massive opportunities is Arthur. Arthur is a program that allows you to interact with up to 40 people in a Virtual Reality. It is specifically designed for virtual office spaces and allows to meet, interact and manage work. It enables the users to be untied from geographical or physical constrictions and opens up a world of innovative working methods. And there are many more programs like Arthur, with their own individual benefits. In any case, implementing VR into your business proceedings is an investment into a bright future.Start your VR journey now.
With Tagueri Digital we want to make all of this happen for you. Our Vision is to help you utilize the benefits that come from working with the technological advancement of Virtual Reality. Here’s an idea of how we would love to help you: – Together, we can create a vision for your VR Meeting solution – We evaluate available tools based on your individual needs and requirements – We create personas and conference rooms with the right tools – We offer workshops to help employees as well as any other important stakeholders understand and handle the technology Virtual Reality can clearly be so much more than just a part of the entertainment industry. The possibilities are only limited to our imagination and will continue to grow within the next couple of years. We already work in various more use cases to accelerate virtual interaction. Contact us, and take your step into an innovative future.