Gaming is just the beginning. Here are 8 innovative ways VR is being used today
Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of Ready Player One is introducing virtual reality (VR) to a whole new audience. But while Ready Player One is set in 2044, here in 2018 VR is capable of some pretty darn exciting things. Here are eight amazing ways that virtual reality is being used right now.Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that the VR application presented in Ready Player One isn't actually something that today's VR technology can actually do (it is, after all, science fiction), let's just consider Digital Trends' list of eight innovative, non-gaming uses for VR:
- Gaming.
- Surgery.
- Live events.
- Collaboration.
- Therapy.
- Education.
- Driving vehicles.
- Porn.
Next, a refresher. In order to be transformative, and technology must enable the user to do something quantitatively new: something that they cannot do without the technology, and which they will want or need to do. This must be a new thing; it cannot simply be a qualitative enhancement of an existing application. It must also be an immediate thing; it cannot be a theoretical future use of the tech, or an unproven hypothetical use of the tech, but must be something can be done right out of the box.
The tech should also be scalable (i.e. it gets cheaper as the technology is more widely adopted) and game-changing in some way, neither of which seem to apply to VR, either, but for now, let's just focus on the first criterion, and apply it to each of the eight items on Digital Trends' list.
1. Gaming. Not only does gaming does not require VR, but every good VR game is either a VR conversion of an existing good game, or quickly converted into a good non-VR game, because there simply aren't enough VR gamers to make VR games economically viable. Also, the entire point of Digital Trends' article is supposed to be that gaming isn't the only use for VR, a focus which is necessary at this point since gaming alone is utterly failing to achieve mass-market adoption of the technology. Hilariously, SuperData Research are apparently still forecasting that VR gaming "may grow to $2.3 billion industry by 2020," something which strikes me as unlikely given that nobody can sell VR headsets or VR games in 2018. VR gaming is a money pit; nobody is making money in VR yet. FAIL.
2. Surgery. Digital Trends specifically point to VR's possible use as a training tool for surgeons, but this is a still-hypothetical future use of the technology, and not something that can be done with VR now. Very simply, VR's current input and control schemes lack the necessary precision, responsiveness, and haptic feedback to make this use of the tech viable. The other surgical use that they give for VR isn't actually VR; it's AR, or Augmented Reality, which is a different animal. AR seems to have a lot more potential application than VR, and even AR is years away from being ready for prime time; VR surgery is not a thing, and does not look like it will become a thing anytime soon. FAIL.
3. Live events. There has yet to be a single successful real-time VR broadcast of a live event that I'm aware of. The bandwidth requirements for VR are enormous -- your venue must be able to stream 360° video, in 4K resolution, at 90 frames a second, twice (once per eye), to potentially millions of event attendees, without lagging, stuttering, or dropping frames, because simulation sickness. That requires an event venue which is pretty specifically wired for VR broadcast at significant expense; such venues do not, to the best of my knowledge, currently exist, which puts live VR event attendance firmly in the sci fi category. Not that it isn't a cool potential future application of the tech, but the current generation of VR can't do this out of the box, which means that it doesn't meet the "immediate" part of our criterion. FAIL.
4. Collaboration. I'm not sure exactly what they envision for the future of VR collaboration. "Using VR, teams who are distributed around the world can log in to the same virtual space to work together on projects. That’s the basis for an existing VR collaboration solution called Vizible from the company WorldViz," is what Digital Trends' article actually says on the subject, but exactly how that would work is not elaborated on, and the embedded advert from WorldViz isn't any better. The best guess I have is that these companies imagine either a VR multi-user domain akin to Second Life, where goggled-in users will actually meet and work together, but MUDs exist already, so VR isn't actually a requirement for that. Also, working in VR sucks. FAIL.
5. Therapy. In order to qualify as a therapeutic tool, VR will have to be evaluated in a double-blind trial, under controlled conditions, and found to be (a) more effective as a treatment than a placebo, and (b) safe for use, something which is far from guaranteed at this point. Until VR is proven to be both safe and effective for therapeutic use, it isn't a therapeutic tool, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling high-tech snake oil. The handful of anecdotal "results" currently being touted as proof of VR's effectiveness for therapeutic use fall far short of that double-blind, repeatable standard. FAIL.
6. Education. VR hasn't been proven to be any more useful as an educational tool than it is as therapeutic one. "Being able to go on a virtual field trip back in time, learn about the risks of polluting the ocean by experiencing it for yourself, or participate in an ethics class using a VR experience designed to put you in someone else’s shoes," all sound interesting, but digital tours and role-playing exercises exist already without VR, and there's absolutely no proof that any of this has greater educational value than, say, textbooks, or extra teachers... technologies whose educational value is well-established, and which can be implemented far more widely given VR's high cost. VR is an expensive toy; if your child's school can afford expensive toys in addition to the fundamentals, then bully for you, but widespread VR classrooms, if they ever happen, are still a long way off, putting this one firmly in the science fiction category. FAIL.
7. Driving vehicles. Remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are already a thing, and don't require VR. FAIL.
8. Porn. I get why Digital Trends included this one; porn helped drive widespread adoption of earlier technologies like VCRs, and helped decide the outcome of the VHS vs. Beta format war, so its ability to push a new technology into widespread use is well-established. Affordable home VCRs were both immediately useful and game-changing, though, two things that VR currently isn't. VCRs enabled a time-shifting activity which consumers of television media are still doing, and gave birth to an entirely new way to distribute and sell media to consumers; VR can qualitatively enhance your porn consumption, but you can still watch porn without a VR headset. FAIL.
Eight of Digital Trends' "8 innovative ways VR is being used today" either failed to innovative, failed to be in use today, or failed to be something other than gaming which their article's title promised specifically. That's an impressively awful result, and it pretty clearly illustrates why VR is failing to catch on.