Virtual realities in the business world

What is VR?

As its name implies, VR is a way of constructing digital simulations that we experience as virtually real. The aim of VR is to abolish the separation between the digital and the real, enabling us to step through the computer display into digital worlds that fully envelop the user on every side. In VR, immersion – the experience of being fully enveloped by the simulation, and presence – the experience of being actually present in the digital world, become paramount. These experiences are achieved through a combination of technologies: motion sensors to track our movements in physical space and to translate those movements in virtual space (accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses); displays that provide a fully immersive, often stereoscopic, visual experience; stereoscopic sound; tactile feedback; and controllers that enable us to interact with the digital environment. This is generally achieved by the use of VR headsets which bring together sensors and stereoscopic displays, often in combination with handheld controllers and usually tethered to a separate computer. The simplest implementation of VR are 180 and 360 videos, which place you in the middle of the scene and allow you to look around is it plays out. More complex implementations involve modelling interactive 3D environments.

Although there has been an increase in awareness of VR in recent years, the technology has been with us for a while. VR has its origins in computer interaction and simulation research, and the first consumer VR systems were developed and launched in the 1990s – predominantly as entertainment and gaming systems. During this period, VR attracted a lot of attention across the cultural world; film, television and fiction offered a tantilizing glimpse of a future of fully immersive digital simulation where our every fantasy could be indulged and fulfilled. While the hype surrounding VR peaked at this time, the capabilities of available systems failed to live up to these inflated expectations. Primitive 3D environments combined with bulky headsets and laggy displays left many users experiencing nausea and disorientation rather than the immersive experience they had been promised. VR largely fell out of the wider public consciousness, relegated to science fiction fantasies and interaction design research.

More recently, technology has begun to catch-up with fiction. Affordable VR has become a reality for entertainment applications and potentially for future business applications. According to the influential Gartner hype cycle (Gartner, 2017), VR has now navigated the hump of inflated expectations and is on the long climb to increased productivity. VR looks like it is here to stay, but how significant it will become in our interaction with digital environments is still open to question.

Leading the way in this recent resurgence of consumer VR systems has been the Occulous Rift headset. The Rift was developed on the back of a 2012 Kickstarter campaign that generated unprecedented interest; it was subsequently acquired by Facebook and launched as a consumer product in late 2016. The success of the initial Kickstarter campaign encouraged other tech companies to develop competitor devices. Sony launched the Playstation VR in 2016 and games company Valve teaming up with manufacturer HTC to produce the Vive headset the same year. These three dedicated devices are strongly tilted towards gaming and entertainment applications and much of their initial uptake has been among the gaming community; their relatively high cost perhaps inhibit wider consumer adoption. Nevertheless the revival in interest in dedicated VR headsets has also prompted the development of VR in other, perhaps more interesting directions.

Samsung and Google have both sought to minimize the upfront costs of VR adoption by exploiting the sensors, displays and audio outputs already present in smartphones. Google’s cardboard started out as a personal project supported by Google’s 20% innovation time allowance – the time allocated to employees to work on their own projects. Launched in 2014 as a template that enabled users to build their own VR headsets from cardboard, a rubber band and two lenses, it was eventually sold in both kit form and fully assembled by Google and many third-party suppliers. Cardboard evolved in 2016 into Google Daydream – a low-cost headset that still relies on smartphones but incorporates a handheld VR controller. Samsung have followed a similar path with their Gear VR headset, which combined with their high-end smartphones provides a low-cost entry point into VR. In both cases, the smartphone is slotted into the headset and provides the display, audio and sensors for the VR experience.

These low-cost makeshift forays into VR by Google and Samsung cannot compete with dedicate systems on the experience of immersion and presence they offer; the limitations of the smartphones on which they rely make them inferior in every respect. But the low entry point has encouraged a far greater degree of innovation in the VR application market that is akin to the innovation in the early smartphone apps market. The low cost has enabled developers to experiment with the use of VR in contexts outside gaming, and VR has started to find purchase in a wider range of applications. One example of this is the Guardian newspapers development of VR content as part of its journalistic and campaigning aims to explore, for example, the experience of solitary confinement or to experience a forensic investigation (Guardian, 2018). Charities such as the National Autistic Society (2017), the Unicef, Cancer Research UK and the Royal National Lifeboat Association have started to use VR to help with public communication (Marrins, 2016). Additionally VR is finding uses in educational contexts (Matthews, 2017).

While VR has improved beyond measure since the 1990s, the technology is still limited in a number of ways. Most VR systems have a relatively restricted field of view, for example. The experience is therefore still akin to looking through a window – or perhaps more accurately a visor – rather than being fully immersed in an environment. More importantly, because in most systems only head movement is monitored, the VR experience is usually a disembodied one. Interaction within the VR environment is also often severely constrained, hampering the use of VR systems in commercial and business productivity contexts. VR headsets are currently cumbersome and bulky which has limited their uptake, and using them in a social context can be unsettling because of the degree to which they isolate users from their immediate surroundings. The factors suggest that at least in the immediate future VR is unlikely to have more than a niche role in commercial and business contexts; nevertheless in those niche roles there are interesting possibilities.

VRs in the business environment

While VR is still in a relatively early stage of development, nevertheless the use of VR is beginning to find purchase in business environments in limited ways. There are two key contexts in which VR applications can bring real business benefits at the present: simulation and situations requiring co-presence. With VR digital simulations can potentially be made more real to end users. There are a number of potential applications for this within the commercial context. The first is in training applications that enable employees to experience situations that have greater realism without exposing either the employee or the organization to additional risks. VR training can also allow people to attend events virtually without leaving their office, potentially bringing significant and reducing costs of employee training. Companies as diverse as KFC and Walmart have invested in VR training simulations and games (Chandler, 2017), and as the technology spreads, employee training is likely to become a key VR application.

The second key simulation application is modelling, particularly in manufacturing, construction, engineering and retail contexts. Architect firms have, for example, begun to explore the use of VR to make architectural models more tangible for the clients, allowing them to literally walk through the plans, and there are similar potential benefits in a wide range of manufacturing and engineering contexts. Last year, the furnishing retailer Ikea launched a VR kitchen enabling shoppers to visualize the furniture in context (Swant, 2017). In all contexts where digital modelling is used, VR can help improve the sense of presence and substantiality of the model.

Situations requiring co-presence implies a rather wider range of possible applications for many service companies. Key among these at the moment is the potential for VR technologies to improve the experience of teleconferencing by giving an improved impression of presence within a shared meeting space than current teleconferencing technologies.

The future of VR

The current applications for VR may be relatively limited but the application of VR technologies today suggest the ways in which VR may start to change the nature of work in the future. Some of the technological changes to come, we can predict as they follow a familiar trajectory or are already in development. Headsets will almost certainly shrink in size over successive generations until they become little more cumbersome than oversized glasses, and perhaps even disappear completely. There are a number of existing devices, for example, that use lasers to imprint visual information directly onto the retinas of their users. At the same time, the resolution of display technology will undoubtedly increase, allowing a greater degree of verisimilitude. VR headsets will perhaps try to provide a fully immersive experience with wider fields of view. And they are likely to lose their tethers allowing greater freedom of movement, with more processing power being directly integrated into the headset itself.

This reduction in the size, weight and encumbrance of VR headsets will by itself be a significant development in the wider adoption of VR technologies. By far the biggest impediments to that wider adoption at the moment is the inconvenience of the equipment and the isolation from physical space. When stepping into the virtual world requires little more effort than putting on a pair of oversize glasses, the social stigma around using VR will perhaps dissipate.

Other developments are more speculative, as they rely on social adoption of new technologies. VR gloves that provide tactile feedback and track hand movement may become common; full tactile body suits are perhaps less likely to find widespread adoption in the foreseeable future. These kinds of developments will improve the psychological illusion of actual being inside the digital simulation, and perhaps blur the distinction between the real and the virtual.

This suggests ways in which VR technologies may begin to transform the world of work in the near future, particularly in relation to the organization of our working lives and relationships. One interesting aspect of VR as a workplace technology is the ways in which it may help support the aspirations of knowledge management and encourage a greater degree of knowledge sharing. Technology has often been integral to knowledge management strategies within organizations, from virtual communities through to knowledge databases. At the same time, technology can be quite alienating in the workplace, trapping employees to their desks and encouraging interaction through impersonal messages rather than face-to-face. Much of KM practice has focused on ways of using technology to overcome these trends or of stepping away from technology in the workplace.

Remote working has become increasingly significant both in the lives of employees and in the organization of businesses in recent years. The ability of the Internet to support complex transactions has enabled more individuals to work remotely some of the time, and some services companies have started to rely predominantly on remote working particularly in, for example, support or helpdesk service. Nevertheless while remote working has significant cost and time benefits for both individuals and organizations, the downsides are also significant. Remote working can be alienating; this impacts both on the individual and on the organization, with the kind of informal social networks on which much productivity relies becoming more difficult to foster and develop. Physically isolated employees are less likely to be invested in the strategic goals and values of an organization and less likely to align their professional identity with the values of their employer. They are also clearly less likely to experience the kinds of serendipitous social interactions and exchanges of ideas an information that oils the wheels of organizational effectiveness.

VR seems like a natural fit to knowledge management strategies in the workplace, allowing people to share social spaces while being physically distant from one another. The use of VR in these kinds of contexts potentially enables individuals to be present within a shared virtual space while distant in physical space. As remote working becomes more common, the virtual space may become the principle working environment of the future, with organizations structured around their virtual environment rather than around their physical spaces.

In many ways, this sounds like a soulless and alienating future. However, that is predicated on the assumption that the material world and the digital world are completely divorced, an assumption that is largely created by the distancing effects of the technologies through which we engage with the digital. As the barrier between the real and the virtual begin to dissolve, we will perhaps start to think of digital spaces as extensions of our physical spaces and presence with the digital environment as real and concrete and experience as presence in our natural environments. And this implies that rather than contributing to the alienating effects of technology, VR may start to overcome some of those effects. Going to work in cyberspace may begin feel as real as going to work in an office.

For the time being, these kinds of applications remain speculative; VR is finding uses in training, modelling and to some degree in teleconferencing but those uses remain niche. It may well be that VR does not eventually break out of its association with simulation and entertainment and remains a niche technology. However, it may be that we are at the beginning of a migration of our working spaces fully into the digital realm.