Managing From Your Couch: Welcome to the VR World!
By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner
A few weeks ago, I joined the Meta-verse by purchasing an Oculus Quest headset. I heard so much about these that I decided to see how far the technology has advanced. It’s been a while since I’ve tried a set of VR glasses.
As a tech geek, I was excited to unbox and try out the headset. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy to get started and I immediately tried all the usual VR experiences which included hiking to the summit at Everest, cruising to the North Pole, experiencing weightlessness in a space shuttle and (of course) playing the necessary silly games. Sitting on the couch and fishing in the virtual pond was fun until I wondered what I looked like in the real world.
After sampling the entertainment side of VR, I started to think about the business side. How can companies use VR to improve operations, improve the customer experience and find ways to monetize the VR world?
Here are five ideas that I came up with. (Disclaimer: none of these are new, just my take on things I would like to try).
Demonstrations - Many of us are responsible for selling very complex projects. Wouldn’t it be great to have our prospects use VR to experience the project? Maybe seeing the outcomes or walking through the finished build out. No more boring PowerPoint slides. Come join me in the virtual world as I take you through a journey.
Project Management - I tried one of the many project management tools. It was quite impressive with the ability to create a virtual war room in minutes. You can bring up traditional business content (docs, spreadsheets and slides), with anything you can load in a web browser (in my case I loaded our company web page), with emails and real time feeds. And that was in my first few minutes. I could build virtual turrets to scroll through information and scan easily across vast amounts of data. I can see the value, no more boring Gantt charts.
Meetings - This is an obvious one given my background. You can have your Avatar meet other people‘s Avatars in virtual meeting space. No more conference rooms booking issues, never a shortage of meeting space in the virtual world. As with project management, you can line the walls with content to share and present content to your colleagues. Pretty cool, but I think I will need a professional avatar builder to get my hair right!
Content/Interviews - I watched a 360 filmed interview for the last CES trade show. It felt pretty close to being there as I was distracted by people walking by the filming in the main exhibit hall in Las Vegas. I thought it was a very effective way of experiencing CES without the massive lines. I wonder what VR will mean for content creators. Will this blog become me talking to you face to face in some cool settings? Do book authors now need to think about print, audiobooks and VR? I am really excited by the new immersive world that will be enabled.
Visualization Data - Given the ability to move through virtual space, I can only imagine the ability to look at and analyze huge data sets in the VR world. Humans are amazing pattern marchers and this technology can unlock that for many verticals. I can imagine this being a game changer for medicine and biotech.
It’s clear that some technology hurdles still need to be solved. These include size of headsets, battery life (always an issue with our toys), next generation bandwidth, simplified content creation, etc.
If you have used VR or AR in your business, please share your experiences. Sometime I feel like we are at the beginning of a major change like we saw when people first started playing with the world wide web.
