Picture this. It’s race day. You're in Monaco and you are sat in the cockpit of your Formula 1 car. You’re in pole position. Your palms are tingling. Your engine is revving. And you’re about to accelerate off the lights. But you hear a worrying alarm going off in the background. What a nightmare. You take your headset off and pause the race. Because it’s dinner time and your food is ready to be taken out of the oven.
How VR is changing our reality
VR is increasingly being used to change our perception of reality and the way we interact with the world. And in many respects it is perhaps as close as we will get in our lifetime to time travel or teleportation – capable of transporting us to completely new and undiscovered worlds.
Over recent years however VR has grown increasingly powerful and its use cases have become more sophisticated, a shift that has moved the technology away from its heritage in gaming and entertainment. VR is no longer just a novelty, it is being deployed by a growing number of businesses to offer real world benefits and opportunities across an array of different sectors that hold up our society. Here are some of my favourite use cases to date:
Enhancing Healthcare:
Some of the most exciting VR use cases today are happening in the healthcare industry. Take one hospital in Mexico that is using it to calm the heart rates of patients en-route to operating theatres. By placing a VR headset on them, a patient can be transported to a beautiful and calming beach, meaning that ill lit winding hospital corridors and anaesthetic needles can all be drowned out of sight and, therefore, out of mind. By calming a patient’s nerves before an operation, VR is not only helping this hospital to create a more positive patient experience but it is also reducing the risk of an operation for the surgeon and medical team.
Accelerating automation:
Car manufacturers were another early adopter of VR, recognising its potential to create a digital workspace environment and transform just about every element of the product life cycle - from initial design of a car through to customer experience and sales. Thanks to VR every inch of a car can be designed, explored and tested without a physical car needing to be built. This naturally brings significant cost and time to market savings for any manufacturer, as well as helping to improve the quality of end product when that model is launched.
From a sales perspective too, VR is an increasingly powerful weapon. It allows dealers to transport customers into the factory for a close up on how their car was created or even to showcase models whenever and wherever is most convenient to them. For example, a potential buyer can effectively view their car in exotic locations such as Venice Beach, all without actually needing to leave their own house, or dealership. This is a concept we explored and piloted alongside Jaguar Land Rover at its recent Jaguar I-Pace launch, offering an exciting glimpse into the possibilities that lie ahead in this sector.
Transforming Education:
In the education sector, VR is opening up a world in which students no longer simply learn passively, but instead fully immerse themselves in a subject. The immersive capabilities of VR mean that students can actually experience walking amongst dinosaurs, flying through space or travelling through the inside of the human body. Imagine the benefits for a vocational group of mechanics for example, if they are able to work on an engine together, and test drive a cars resulting performance when changes are made to it - all without actually needing to leave the lecture room.
There is huge potential for VR in education as educators continue to realise the power a new perspectives on old subjects can bring. Its potential does also extend far beyond the class room too. Take this example from the University of Oregon, which sent out VR headsets to undergraduate students allowing them to explore the college campus. Universities recognise that to attract students and distinguish themselves from their competition, they now need to make that element of the experience as attractive as possible – and the use of new technologies like VR are a key way of achieving that.
