Virtual and Augmented Reality’s Ascension as Collaboration Tools – No Jitter

Virtual reality (VR) has been plagued for decades now by a lack of understanding about the problem its supposed to solve. There have been at least a few hype cycles over the last few decades, none of which resulted in anything resembling mass adoption. However, VR growth has exploded over the past 18 months and is finally approaching mainstream consumer use. But what about for business use? Does VR have a place outside of niche applications? Does it have a place in the unified communications (UC) suite?

When evaluating emerging technologies, Ive always found it helpful to ask these two questions to determine if something is significant beyond the hype.

1) What problem does the technology solve?

2) What does the technology do better than existing ones?

For this post, Ill answer these questions in the context of the communications and collaboration space.

What Problem Does VR Solve?

So why now? What makes this time different than 2008?

For me, the answer came at the beginning of the pandemic, when I began to think about the question of how do we collaborate when we cant meet in person? I was amazed to see the growth and success of video meetings but was frustrated by the shortcomings of the tools we use today.

My casual interest in VR led me down the rabbit hole of Google searches, a trip to Walmart to buy an Oculus headset, and months spent on various platforms speaking with enthusiasts and researchers from across the globe.

Almost immediately, I began to see VR in the context of a world on lockdown, quickly seeing its power VR as a collaboration tool, one very different than any of the traditional tools we use today. Thats when I began to see the problems that VR is uniquely in a position to solve, such as the following:

How do you network when you cant meet in person?

How do you browse a retail store during a lockdown?

How do you conduct remote learning when schools are closed?

How do you gather for recreation when you cant socialize?

How do you attend conferences when you cant leave the house?

How do you effectively conduct training when you cant travel?

How do you conduct team building and assimilate new hires during a pandemic?

The pandemic forced us to think about the answers to these questions. And the immediate choices were Zoom, Teams, Webex, and other web conferencing tools.

What Does VR Do That Zoom Doesnt?

Weve seen web conferencing tools used in all of the above examples, with mixed results. Many areas exist where Zoom, Teams, and Webex do fine and are even preferable to VR. But there are two big areas where VR truly shines, coming closer to real-life interactions.

1) Support for Casual Conversations

Zoom works great for one-to-one or one-to-many interactions but fails in the many-to-many environments we encounter in the real world. Ive joined dozens of networking groups in VR, where you gather with people from all over the world in a shared space, where thanks to spatial audio, users can mingle, meet each other, and have individual or small group discussions. You cant replicate that functionality on Zoom, Teams, or Webex. These are the conversations that we find the most value in and the reasons we travel to networking groups, conferences, and other business meetings. Zoom can support the keynote at a conference, but it cant replicate the unplanned conversations outside the keynote in the way VR can.

2) Immersiveness

When you put on a VR headset, you block out the rest of the world. You are immersed in the environment you enter, which is about more than teleporting to somewhere cool. It helps drive the emotion of whatever youre doing in VR, thereby driving outcomes when an emotional connection adds to the experience. This connection is why there is already such huge interest in VR as a training tool, where you can simulate a real-world environment in ways that you cant do with others or are impractical or impossible in real life.

One of the big surprises in my journey into VR was how the experience tends to be more intimate than a video call. I know that sounds crazy and counterintuitive, but its exactly what I experienced. How does this happen? How can social VR with avatars be more intimate than a video call? The answer lies in the successful illusion of being in a shared space together. On a Zoom call, theres never the feeling that the group is together in the same place. The fact that their faces are grouped in a grid doesnt translate into the feeling of proximity. In VR, theres an authentic feeling of being in the same space physically with other people, creating a sense of intimacy that doesnt come across in other collaboration tools.

This sense of shared space and proximity provides an interesting opportunity to leverage VR in some unique ways. We already see solutions designed around team building and onboarding where the objective is to build relationships. This level of personal connection isnt needed in all interactions, just as sometimes a phone call is good enough. But we will see more and more of a need to find creative ways to provide more personal connections between our remote employees as we support the long-term adoption of remote workers.

Combining these two areas provides for a completely different experience than any other technologies out there, one that comes the closest to meeting in person. That is where the real power of VR lies and why it will become a big part of our personal and business lives as a communications tool and part of the suite of UC applications.

Stay tuned for part two, the final installment in this series, where Ill discuss how augmented reality will be even more transformational than VR.

This post is written on behalf of BCStrategies, an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.

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Virtual and Augmented Reality's Ascension as Collaboration Tools - No Jitter