What is the future of virtual reality?

Even though it is a technology that until recently seemed futuristic, the virtual reality is already present in our lives, both in the field of leisure and in the professional world. Y  still has a long way to go.

As technology development progresses and new minerals are discovered that improve the performance of microprocessors, miniaturization advances.

This makes it possible to integrate more and more microchips in the same processing size, allowing higher speed, better graphics processing, more memory and more storage, both in traditional computers and in newer devices such as those that allow us to experience virtual reality.

With these advantages appearing every three months, we can have more realistic, faster and more complex experiences in the computer world.

On the other hand, and thanks to the prolonged confinements that the pandemic brought us, we saw that it is possible to do more and better things remotely, with more productivity and greater efficiency, taking advantage of all the time available to balance work and personal life.

In this scenario, technology is playing a very important role in the development of scientific advances, the connection between more people and the speed at which scientific breakthroughs are known.

All these elements contribute to the fact that the future of virtual reality is developing at a dizzying pace, with new functionalities periodically and an increasingly agile adaptation process.

Virtual reality in training and learning

In the workplace, virtual reality is a tool that allows for the training of more to train more employees in an immersive way in an immersive way to move from 15% classroom learning retention to experiential learning that can retain knowledge by up to 80%.

With these mechanisms, each staff member will be able to be productive in a third of the time previously spent on the initial learning curve and on-site practice, reducing the number of errors thanks to the muscle memory developed by experiencing the use of a virtual machine and avoiding waste.

On the other hand, the trainer’s time can be devoted to creating more and more immersive environments, becoming highly productive, without spending more money.

Virtual reality and communication

With the announcement of the metaverse, many, many companies are developing parallel worlds and digital twins within them to receive avatars that represent us, along with our personal properties and tastes.

In these virtual worlds it is possible to develop the same activities as in the real world, with the limitations of the virtual world, since we could not have a coffee, but we can share spaces with our friends.

There are virtual corporate environments to maintain team cohesiveness, such as video calls or trade fairs with avatars. An example of this is  Virtual Involve: a private metaverse to which you can add your corporate image and receive hundreds of participants.

In a virtual world like these, we can interact with our colleagues through their avatars, witness training with 3D product models or work collaboratively on design prototypes.

Opportunities of virtual reality for marketing and advertising

This is a very prominent area of which we have seen many examples currently, such as telling the story of a drink by reading its label with our smartphone and discovering it on the spot.

It is also used in sites such as Amazon to project the products we want to buy in our real space, allowing us to “see” them as if they were there, through the camera of the phone or tablet.

As in the Pokémon game, we can live an outdoor journey to find clues that lead us to the destination, do a treasure hunt, make an application that combines experiences and with it generate points that can be redeemable in physical and virtual stores.

Sales: shopping in virtual reality

Thanks to virtual tools, we can travel with our large products on our cell phones and through augmented reality. augmented realityto give the buyer a vision of the product installed in their own spaces.

There are also complex products or services that are best explained with an image; one of them is Smart Cities, which are easily understood by anyone when viewing a simulation on a mobile device in which we can show the savings generated by a wind turbine or the dynamics of waste collection.

Now that we are experiencing the difficulty of moving around, it has become indispensable for buyers and sellers to have virtual shopping mechanisms in countries and especially sites other than Amazon or Alibaba that can deliver locally.

For them, virtual showcases are now being built on the Internet, linked to e-commerce and logistics systems, with an improvement, such as the virtual consultant in the virtual showroom.

Machinery maintenance with virtual reality

Currently we must train engineers and operators in extensive courses, many of them abroad with the manufacturers of this equipment. These collaborators return with very little understanding of the content received.

With mixed reality tools, it is possible to develop customized content to service and operate large machines from a mobile device as the simulator shows the maintenance steps as it follows the step-by-step deployment with the camera.

It is also possible to connect to IoT sensors via Bluetooth and make adjustments to their internal systems without even touching them.

Virtual reality and Industry 4.0

With virtual, augmented and mixed reality, we can provide operators with a pair of augmented reality glasses to show on the viewer how many components are required for the assembly of a part, which is the step by step and deduct the parts used from inventories.

As we can see, the use of these technologies in the industry is becoming more and more frequent and intense given the automation of processes, the reduction of time and the need to connect remote technical support at the very moment it is needed, allowing the second level support to see live what the other person is experiencing on the other side of the world.

Technology such as virtual reality has arrived to improve our lives, connect us easily and bring people, experiences and especially knowledge closer together.