VR/AR Expected to Impact Much More Than Video and Gaming

Most conversation about virtual reality and augmented reality focuses on how it will impact gaming and video entertainment. But a recent report from Goldman Sachs upends that notion, with its prediction that VR and AR will instead open up “an entirely new marketplace of applications” for both the business and consumer sectors. The report states that virtual reality hardware will be an $80 billion industry within 10 years, which is actually a slow adoption when compared to that of smartphones and tablets.

TechCrunch uses the Goldman Sachs report as a jumping-off point to re-imagine the workplace and communication in general. “Five or 10 years ago, we used text to communicate,” it notes. “Today, we communicate and share with photos and videos. Tomorrow, with VR, we’ll be able to communicate with experience.”

CES_2016_Samsung_Gear_VR

If the Goldman Sachs report is correct, clearly VR and AR are going to impact much more than games and entertainment. The report “theorizes that these use cases will account for less than half the software market.”

TechCrunch drills down into the “unlimited potential of a hybrid reality,” especially for enterprise where “by combining analog, two-dimensional ways of working with new mixed-reality experiences… can transform our ability to communicate, collaborate and create.”

This hybrid mixed reality will enable “two people across the world to put on a headset and share any experience they choose.” For the workplace it will enable improved collaboration: a “global workforce of remote teams” that can “tackle an organization’s challenges,” regardless of time zone, physical location or even language, with Google Translate acting in real-time. It will also allow workers more choice with regard to when and how they work.

“Latency, or the time between an action and its response, is eliminated when our work is memorialized digitally as we complete it,” explains TechCrunch. “A client or supervisor is able to join our work process digitally at any time to track and review progress.”

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