Are you ready for 2017?
Our colleague Chelsea Mize recently wrote “If you stay up to date with business and technology news, you undoubtedly know about the rise of virtual reality (VR) technology. Though the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR commercials boast the captivating promise of VR in the entertainment and gaming space, VR technology also holds massive potential for the corporate world.”. We could not agree more!
The landscaped-ability for any business to be efficient in today’s business-world is crucial to all modern business models. The value of a virtual meeting space is now becoming abundantly clear, with hundreds of thousands of businesses now using [the technology] on a regular basis – and because of the popularity, it is now completely scalable from 1 moderator to as many as you need.
“Perhaps the most obvious potential of VR to transform the workplace is in the realm of conferencing and virtual meetings.” continues Mize. “According to Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, “VR meetings will allow for nuanced nonverbal communication — proper eye contact, subtle cues such as interpersonal distance, and eventually virtual touch and smell (when desired).”
The interpersonal communication that occurs through body language and social cues — information that is lost in conventional audio and video conferences — would finally be accessible in VR meetings, conveyed via sophisticated “avatars” that act as digital stand-ins for each meeting participants.”
We are not fully there yet on VR, but today’s meetings do call you!
If you are still dialing into a conference, it is by choice that you do so. Today’s conferencing/online meeting technology – such as with GlobalMeet and iMeet – will call you at the touch of a button, as well as meet all the demands of sharing and collaboration over a secure & reliable network.
But what about the VR aspect of business meetings?
We are not there yet, but as Mize points out: “Companies like the Google venture startup “Alt-Space VR” and the company “High Fidelity” are heavily invested in creating highly-customizable, sophisticated 3D avatars that users could adjust and adorn to represent their ideal business identities in VR meetings.”
As High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale explained, “Our aspiration is to create a really photorealistic looking person so it’ll be like looking into the virtual mirror… The more that looks like a real person, the more stunningly compelling it is to use it.”
She continues: “Imagine a world where you could jump into a business meeting while sitting on your couch wearing tattered old sweatpants with unkempt hair and leftover toast crumbs from breakfast dusting your shirt. Meanwhile, your VR business avatar is decked out to the nines in the virtual approximation of a hand-tailored Armani suit with perfectly-coifed hair. Your business avatar would look, sound and even act like your real self – but just a little bit better.”
