We don’t need to dream about what the future will become, instead, just look around. It’s already happening. The difference now, with all those VR headsets, is that VR is going for the masses. But it’s been a solid reality for the latest decades. If you want to make a prediction for the future, look to the past and present, and you will be able to see all the potential applications…
Just keep in mind. VR is not only limited to VR headsets (head-mounted displays), and content are not limited to those generated by computers.
So, top most common and important VR applications for NOW (and solid bets for the near future):
Training. From militar training to flight simulators. The benefits are: it’s cheaper and safer. And in most cases it’s even more effective, because you can easily recreate a huge number of dangerous and rare situations, adding more value to the training. In Brazil, to get a driver license you have to train on real cars AND on a virtual device (very similar to a arcade game) that will tackle specific dangerous situations like overtakes on two-lane road (the default highway in this country, and scenario of many accidents).
At our lab, we developed a VR application to train workers of live overhead power lines. It’s one of the most dangerous job, with hundreds of deaths per year in Brazil, so training and recycling are the main tools to preserve the worker’s lives. Like flight simulators, our application enables instructors to safely reacreate a number of dangerous situations, like faulty equipment, storms, electric arcs, fire, explosions, etc.
Trainings like this make sense because one of the greatests benefits of VR is the Immersion, when your senses are tricked to believe that you really are on that simulated place, under that situation, and you and your body will probably respond and behave accordingly (with fear of heights, for example).
When VR gets cheaper, why not perform virtual trainings for all kinds of jobs and activities? Make it accessible for everybody, in schools, etc, to get better professionals. And why not extend from training to evaluation? Just put some job candidates on your VR/Serious Game tool and collect some practical and objective performance data. How he/she will behave when a problem client appears? Which tools they will choose to solve this task? What they will do in a given stress situation?
Prototyping. VR prototyping is probably the most common application, and is being applied to many work fields, specially engineering & design (oil, gas, avionics, automotive, civil construction, industry, etc), scientific visualization, education, etc… Again, main benefit is the lower cost and time to validate a given model, before other steps of the pipeline, and possibility to study a huge number of variations and pick the best one. Of course, you don’t really need to use VR from the scratch (with immersion, 3D- stereo, 1:1 scale, interaction, etc), but in a number of times those features will increase the ammount and value of insights, and also, it will help clients and directors to easily understand, visualize and validate what is being proposed. So it’s a valuable communication technique too.
Telepresence. Yes. VR is also telepresence, or how to allow a person to feel as if they were present at a real place other than their true location. Virtual robotic surgeries are a very common example, allowing the user to interact remotely with the observed environment.
But you don’t need to go that far. Load up some 360 video/ Google street view / Google Earth on a VR Headset and you are there, geting all the known benefits of those tools, enhanced with a deep sense of immersion. Benefits of telepresence are, again, save costs and time, and in some cases allowing the impossible like visiting public-restricted or physically restricted places (ie: inside human body, roam through Mars, walk through radioactive streets of Fukushima).
At our Lab in University of Sao Paulo, we are studiyng how VR can benefit Archaeology Researchers, since mostly of archaeological sites are located in isolated and hard to access places, and the time of work on those areas is heavily restricted by the limited research budgets. By using 3D scanners, Photogrametric reconstruction and other techniques, we can virtually recreate the environment, allowing the Archaeologists to visit it and visualize all the data collected by traditional means inside the original context. They can easily bring fellow specialists on demand, even from other countries, have insights, share and discuss the results, and plan next steps.
About the Communication/Social purpose, I see that VR could be a powerful tool for social changes, given those Telepresence and Immersion characteristics I mentionated before. Right now, games ARE this tool. For example, the indie game “That Dragon, Cancer”. But could be even better.
We are very aware of other people’s problems, but it’s only when you presence and feel it, event if it’s through a immersive narrative, that real empathy arises. What is like to face a Cancer disease. What is like to be a woman, a man, a minority, a refugee, a poor kid in Africa, an Autistic, a hunted animal specie, etc…
Maybe VR for the masses could be a tool not only for pointless entertainment, immersive Second-lives and Black Mirrors, but to make better, fair society, through building empathy and respect for each other, who knows. Maybe I’m an optimistic, but it’s up to us to choose how we use available technologies, for better or worse.
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