what is the future of Virtual Reality?

 Today, VR technology extends beyond gaming and entertainment and is considered extremely promising in many industries. Here are the three virtual reality applications from across the domains that are expected to develop rapidly and become viable in the next five years.

Remote virtual workplace. 

With telework considered the wave of the future, companies need game-changing technologies to sustain remote operations in the long run. This is where VR offers to break new ground, allowing employees to meet, discuss, collaborate, and interact with simulated objects without leaving home.

In May, Facebook made headlines with the demo of a VR workplace that demonstrated floating displays, resized and moved with hand gestures, and a virtual keyboard the user types in a simulation. The company plans to “supercharge remote work and productivity” with the cutting-edge solution leveraging Oculus VR hardware and Passthrough, the proprietary technology creating virtual experiences.

Immersive learning

Virtual reality also promises to make K-12 and university education ultra-immersive and practice-oriented. Students can put on VR headsets and go on field trips to museums, farms, manufacturing sights, historical cities, and even to the moon. In a simulated environment, students also can interact with abstract concepts or conduct experiments that are hard to recreate in an average classroom.

Before the pandemic, virtual reality was tentatively introduced in the classrooms, yet lately, its use accelerated immensely, adopted by teachers who wanted to render at-home education efficient and fun. Due to this popularity, educational VR is expected to remain a common support tool in the physical classroom and continue to advance.

Virtual reality therapy

Virtual reality is being increasingly employed by large-scale medical facilities for the treatment of various psychological issues, from PTSD to depression and phobias. The technology is highly regarded for being a drug-free method with proven effectiveness, as well as for the capacity to design individual treatment simulations for each patient.

VR and its overview

Today, the VR therapy market is burgeoning with new developments, the prime example being the recently announced OVR social engagement by Oxford VR. This automated platform is meant to help people suffering from anxious social avoidance by allowing them to participate in different public situations, from riding a bus to shopping to visiting a doctor, in virtual reality.

I suppose that depends on what you call virtual reality. In my opinion, Virtual Reality involves a headset that is somehow displaying images to your vision, either by panel displays or perhaps by projecting directly onto your retina. For this version of VR, I think we can get pretty far. If the optics can be figured out it should only be a matter of several generations at the most before VR can envelop your entire field of view. Headsets like the Pimax 8K are already looking at drastically expanding the horizontal FOV and increasing the clarity through much higher-resolution displays. Unfortunately, I’ve heard that the frame rate is not awesome and even if it was it would take a prohibitively expensive computer to run it. So before we get there we need what is currently considered a high-end GPU to become mid to lower tier so that the average Joe who wants to be “responsible” with his money can still justify the purchase.

If you look at the input methods we have right now with Touch and Vive wands, they are pretty amazing. And they are first-generation input devices. For things like holding guns or swords, they are already almost perfect. Some might argue that the ideal device would be no device at all, and just have your hands tracked, but I would disagree with that. If I’m holding something in VR, it needs to feel like I’m holding something in real life. This could be achieved with some sort of mechanical resistance glove that stops your fingers from moving when they come against a virtual object but the number of moving parts in such a glove would probably make it very expensive and prone to breaking. I’m sure whatever the perfect input method winds up being, it will be quite different from anything that I’ve imagined and will be made by people much smarter than me. Considering how close they got on their first try, I don’t think it will take too many iterations to land on something that is just mind-boggling.

So that’s the image and input covered. Only leaves one other area that I feel is really important to maximally immersive VR; locomotion. At the moment we generally move around in VR the same way we have moved around in video games for decades; with a control stick. For some, this is good enough, but even for those like myself who don’t get sick from it, it is immersion-breaking. There have been several interesting and moderately successful attempts to change how motion works including what I think of as skiing, where swinging your arms makes you move such as one of the options available in Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Handgrenades, then there is something being worked on by a develop named NimSony (you can check him out on YouTube) called Walk-o-motion and it takes the bobbing of the headset and turns it into motion so you walk in a place and your character moves in the game. This option is decent and does add to the immersion, but it is exhausting, looks really silly, and makes it difficult to say in one place. There have been a few different versions of “treadmills” such as Virtuix Omni, which allow you to actually walk in place through the use of special shoes that slip on the surface of the treadmill and trackers on the shoes that convert the motion of your feet to move in the game. If you watch videos of this in action it becomes apparent what the shortfalls are, but it may be the best currently available option for being able to actually walk in VR. However, the other day I came across an Indiegogo campaign by Jamie Hyneman (probably spelled wrong) from Myth Busters who is working on a special shoe with wheels and a treadmill on them that basically allow you to actually walk normally on the spot without moving. Though the video looks promising he is still making sure that people who pledge their support know that there is a lot of work to be done, and it’s possible that it may not work. I hope it does though because being able to actually walk in VR might be the most impactful accomplishment yet to be made as far as presentation goes.

All of these problems are probably ten years or less away from being solved. However, some people seem to be working towards a direct neural interface where the VR system just tricks your brain into believing all of this stuff is happening, like in the Matrix. I am fine with anything mentioned in the previous paragraphs, but if it ever does become possible to “jack in” using my brain, that's when I bow out. However, I don’t expect this sort of brain-computer interface to exist in my lifetime.