Reminder: VR is still not useful. Also, tech journalism continues to be a bad joke.

Spotted today, on Tech Republic: "5 top use cases for AR/VR in business, and how you can get started."

Challenge accepted! Shall we keep score?

According to an Altimeter report by analyst Omar Akhtar, the combined market size for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is expected to grow exponentially from about $18 billion in 2018 to $215 billion in 2021. With this growing push toward immersive technology, many business are questioning how they can utilize it and how to being implementing it into their strategies.

Analysts have been making equally aggressive growth forecasts for VR for the past two years; as yet, this forecast growth has not materialized, and there is no sign that it's going to suddenly start happening anytime soon. I've noticed that Altimeter are now rolling AR and VR together into this number, which is probably wise considering that VR is not a thing, but there's no evidence yet of AR being ready for prime time, either. Not a good start. F.

Emily Olman, CEO of VR/AR at Hopscotch Interactive, said in the report that immersive technology implementation is a question of "when, not if."

"The sooner your company is able to understand the language [of AR/VR] and become fluent in what the possibilities are, the faster they are going to be able to react," Olman said in the report.

When people with a vested material interest in something keep predicting that it's just about to happen, for years on end, with no sign of it actually happening, you should be very suspicious. Someone whose job title includes "of VR/AR" definitely falls into this category, as do Altimeter themselves, whose actual business is "providing research and advisory on how to leverage disruptive technologies." I'd recommend that you take any of their recommendations with a healthy pinch of salt, if double handfuls of salt weren't actually needed here. F.

Here are the five use cases for immersive technology outlined in the report.

This is where things really start to go downhill.

1. Create brand awareness

Advertising is already a thing, and does not require VR. There are companies already using VR in limited ways for location-based VR "events," but there's no evidence of those PR stunts being any more effective than, or even equal in effectiveness to, non-VR advertising methods. The problem is that VR doesn't have any "buzz" of its own, anymore; as VR's sales numbers clearly show, consumers really don't give a shit about the technology. Using a product which has no buzz to speak of, in order to generate buzz for your product, sure looks to me like an exercise in futility. F.

2. Train employees

Altimeter claims that "[i]mmersive technology has proven itself to be an effective tool in training situations," but that's more a matter of purpose-built simulators, and not necessarily true of VR per se. To date, there has been no properly peer-reviewed study of VR's effectiveness as a training tool that I'm aware of. That's not to say that AR or VR necessarily wouldn't or couldn't make for effective training tools, depending on the type of environment being simulated, but to claim that VR is an effective all-purpose training tool that can be dropped into any business, which is explicitly the claim being made here, is simply false. F.

3. Test and learn customer needs and preferences

Testing physical prototypes isn't currently possible in VR, because available control schemes don't provide the same level of dexterity or precision as human hands, or anything approaching the level of haptic feedback provided by the human sense of touch. If you want to test how a prototype feels to use, then you'll need to build one or more of them, and let people use them. This puts product testing firmly in the realm of hypothetical future uses of VR technology... which is, again, not the claim being made by Altimeter, who are presenting this as fait accompli.

I won't even talk about AR's applicability here, since I can't even imagine how one would apply Augmented Reality to practical product testing. As for determining customer needs and preferences, apart from practical product testing... well, focus groups are already a thing, and don't require VR. F.

4. Build customer trust and confidence in the product

Altimeter's report references "high-end products like luxury goods or furniture" at this point, which runs right into one of VR's major weaknesses: the lack of physicality. Most users looking to drop thousands of dollars on e.g. furniture will want to sit in the chairs, touch and feel the quality of the fabrics and materials, see the effects of real-world lighting conditions on the colours, and so on, none of which is currently possible in VR.

Also, isn't this basically the same as point #3? The fact that you're past the prototype stage and onto more finished items doesn't make this any less a case of virtual product testing.

Finally, virtual show rooms and tours have been a thing for decades already, and neither actually requires VR. F.

5. Bring people together

Companies already have any number of ways "to extend their reach," "bring customers closer together," or "allow better communication," using nothing more than existing telecommunications and social media platforms. The Internet is already a thing, and does not require VR. Social media is also already a thing, and also does not require VR.

Social VR is not a thing, and there is no reason to believe that it will become a thing anytime in the foreseeable future; that's why Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook's shareholders not to expect profits from Oculus for years.

There's no evidence that people are even physically capable of spending all day working in VR, either, so there's no reason to believe that teams of people will be able to spend hours on end collaborating in virtual spaces, let alone the days, or weeks, or months required to take a project from conception to completion. That just leaves teleconferencing... which is also already a thing, and also doable without VR. F.

So much for the promised "use cases for VR/AR." Once again, we have a list of the ways in which VR and/or AR will revolutionize the ways business does everything that (a) includes obvious filler, (b) includes no items whose touted effectiveness is supported by actual data, and (c) includes no items which actually require VR. But what about the other promise in Tech Republic's lede?

[Altimeter's] report offered six tips on how to begin implementing VR technology.

• Decide what you will use it for. Though immersive tech possibilities are endless, the report suggested defining a clear plan for using it, whether with customers, products, or employees.

Once again, we're back to hypothetical future uses of a technology that currently isn't useful for much of anything. Altimeter will probably be quite happy to sell you a bunch of expensive "research" and "advice" in the interim, though, while advising you to keep hoping that actual uses of the technology will eventually materialize. F.

• Visualize outcomes to secure executive support. Develop a clear image of success for immersive tech to convince potential cynics of why it's useful. 

While you will need executive support to secure a budget for VR in most businesses, securing it will probably be rather difficult, since nobody will be able to point to any specific area where business success requires VR. I do like that Altimeter have (correctly) predicted that there will be a lot of resistance to spending significant sums of money on something as fundamentally useless as VR/AR, though. C.

• Assign an internal champion. To insure success, the report suggested finding an employee passionate about the technology who has a vision for its implementation.

As someone who works in a corporate environment, I can tell you that this is absolutely what gets recommended by people who are selling terrible tech solutions to decision-makers who really should know better, but who somehow don't. Having "an internal champion" does nothing to make the technology in question work as advertised; it just helps people overlook the otherwise-obvious costs of adopting a technology that isn't ready for deployment, and which isn't at all suited to the business to which that tech is being sold... until those costs are already mounting, that is.

Folks, this is 100% pure hype; never believe the hype. F.

• Imagine the impossible. The report suggested that using immersive technology doesn't have to be exactly like a real experience. The emerging tech can be anything so businesses should look at their ideas through a more creative lens.

And this is where we go from empty marketing hype to selling snake oil. No technology ever invented can be or do "anything," and VR is no exception. Again, I'm entirely sure that Altimeter will helpfully sell you all any and all "research" and "advice" you could ask for, along the way to the realization that you've been pwned, but you will have been pwned... and if you were stupid enough to fall for this pitch, you'll have deserved it. F.

• Get your 3D assets together. Organization, as noted in the report, is key for the 3D technology. Creating a centralized database of all 3D assets can make it easier for employees and vendors.

This has nothing to do with VR, specifically, but if your business already has VR assets, then having a searchable database of those assets is something that you should be doing anyway, whether you have VR/AR aspirations or not. If your business does not already have applicable 3D assets, then do not spend money developing them until after you're already decided to go down the VR rabbit hole. C.

• Plan for interoperability. To continue a customer-centric unified experience, the report noted that companies should merge data generated from AR, MR, and VR with traditional data systems. 

You should always plan for interoperability when incorporating any new technology into your business; I've experienced the alternative, and you do not want to go there. Again, though, this has nothing to do with VR. C.

Final score: 0.35 = F.

Altimeter's report is both sketchy and dodgy: there is simply no data to support the claims being made, and obvious conflicts of interest put Altimeter in ethically dubious territory when making them. The fact that Tech Republic simply parroted Altimeter's claims without any sort of critique or fact-checking is a failure of their responsibility as journalists; their "coverage" is not so much journalism as stenography. Granted, the piece's author is just a summer intern, and not a full-fledged journalist, but failing to even mention what sort of business Altimeter is in, and simply referring to them as "analysts," is the sort of thing that should never have got past a competent mentor... or editor.