VR market trends at a glance:
- The global market of VR is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.0% during 2021-2027
- It is estimated that the VR market size will reach 26860 million by 2027
- In 2019, VR’s contribution to GDP was valued at $13.5 billion, the figures are expected to reach $450.5 billion by 2030, projects PwC
- The growth and expansion of VR technology will support more than 23 million jobs worldwide, reports PwC
The figures and trends above give a glimpse into the future of VR globally. Virtual reality is one of the most important enterprise technology a business or an organization can adopt today.
VR’s popularity and disruptive nature have cleared many misconceptions about the technology: that it’s complex, futuristic, only restricted to gaming and entertainment. But in reality, the technology has wide utility and businesses have started to realize the fact that it has the potential to help them grow. And it’s transformative growth is not futuristic but can be leveraged today.
Businesses are utilizing the multiple advantages that virtual reality offers, including real-time collaborations in a virtual workspace, from remote locations. The headways VR enables are explicitly evident in sectors such as retail, automotive, manufacturing, hospitality, and healthcare, and almost everyone is certain that this technology has applications in other industries as well.
Let’s find out how virtual reality in business is leveraging and adding value to the existing ecosystem
Virtual Meetings And Collaborations
Notwithstanding the disruption in business continuity and economic fallout brought about by COVID, businesses already using or early adopters of VR in their day-to-day operations found the transition smooth and experienced relatively low downtime, as compared to other businesses.
On one hand, there were VR applications such as Zoom and Google Meet that offered video conferencing features and on the other hand, there were applications such NextMeet, which enabled the users to not only access from remote locations but it also ended the monotony of remote work by providing an avatar-based immersive 3D environment to collaborate, meet and communicate.
We could say that VR not only solves the modern-day work challenges but also ends the monotony that comes with remote working.
Education And Training
Education and training businesses became one of the primary beneficiaries of the technology and also the early adopters. Inculcation of VR in education and training fills the gap that traditional teaching and training methods could not. It enables the mentors and trainees to create immersive experiences for their students. Businesses relying heavily on internal training and assessment, find the VR technology useful as they are now able to do it at a lower cost, and results have outperformed traditional training methods.
Educational institutes have leveraged the technology to create impactful and immersive learning experiences for their students. They found that the students were more engaged and responsive during the sessions as they were able to retain more information than in normal classroom environments
Retaining The Retail
As the world shifted towards VR technology, the retail industry and stores followed the suit. VR technology is revolutionizing the ‘try before you buy‘ concept and many brands are leading by example. Brands are creating immersive experiences for their customers to showcase products. Companies are adding unique features in their marketing kitty, such as Volvo giving its customers a virtual test drive on their phones. Lacoste offers its audience a virtual try of their shoes, through AR mobile app. VR offers a great marketing opportunity for brands.
Powerful insights for the medical industry
It is believed that physicians became the first users of VR technology. The technology provides doctors with meaningful data and insights of patients which were not easy to collect and process earlier. Complete anatomy of a patient’s body is now accessible to doctors and surgeons performing complex surgeries and to patients who undergo rehabilitation therapy.
Modern equipment uses VR to scan a patient’s internal organs, giving a more accurate picture for doctors to diagnose than traditional X-rays. Today, doctors can diagnose disease much earlier.VR is a blessing for the medical industry that relies on the accuracy and timely interventions.
Innovative And Immersive Gaming Experience
The gaming industry is one such industry that did not show any signs of distress or slump even during the COVID. As people had more time and leisure became a new normal for a while. Merging the real-world environment with digital objects is core to gaming. VR and AR technology perfectly does this and this is what makes gaming the most common application of VR technology
VR applications are not just limited to creating gaming experiences but other forms of entertainment are also available such as art galleries, virtual parks, and museums. You can also find these inside the NextMeet platform.
Travel Without Moving
VR is one of the most disruptive technologies so far. It gives the advantage of experiencing objects and places without even moving from one location to another. It allows users to experience travel destinations, tourist spots, sightseeing and explorations from one place.
One thing, that VR technology offers is equal opportunity. In this case, people who could not travel due to health and mobility issues can explore the unexplored world and live their dream using a virtual reality platform.
In each of the above scenarios, VR provides the travel and tourism industry with a chance to not just survive but thrive.
A Tool To Convey Design Ideas And Iterations
Architects and civil engineers welcomed the VR technology as they realized that VR is a tool that can help them to convey their design iterations and ideas to the world. It also gives an easier understanding of the blueprints than 2D paper drawings.
While 2D drawings are limited to smaller projects, VR gives a life-size view of huge infrastructure projects such as bridges, highways, and cities, broken down into simpler pieces of visual information.
VR can help engineers and construction companies to realize clients’ construction projects.
Simplifying complex systems
Companies often spend a huge chunk of their annual budget on product training to either their customers or internal teams. Some products work on either a sophisticated technology that requires training or work on mechanisms that are complex to understand on their own. VR enables these companies to create VR models of their products to help people understand the intricate working of the machine or the product without incurring a huge cost.
As VR is easy to integrate with industrial automation components, it gives technicians a first-hand view of design models and their components, this saves time in future overhauling or error detection.
Conclusion
At this stage of technological evolution, we all have some kind of thought and assessment on what virtual reality (VR) is and its implications. Unfortunately, there are people, industries, and sectors, that are away as far as experiencing it. However, the VR industry is positive about the fact that people are increasingly gaining awareness and adapting to this emerging technology, and its advantages have started to appear across several industries.
