I was reading the excellent article by Andrej Karpathy on Virtual Reality. In his article he mentions many games that should be delivered with a bucket, because they do make people sick by using motion that our brains are not able to process. One reason for nausea is that our body gets contradictory signals from our senses and thus think we have been poisoned, and wants to get those mushrooms out before its too late.
At Weavr we have been helping people create virtual reality experiences and we have seen that there are some fields where it excels. So I decided to continue the tradition to write follow up stories on Andrej’s work, like I did with his piece on AI, and share our findings about fields where Virtual Reality does make sense and applications are already being successfully used. And I will stick to applications, no games.
Layout of the Weavr standard viewer in Virtual Reality
Real Estate
If you have moved to a new city you know the challenges of going apartment hunting. You are not local, so you end up cramming as many visits as you can in a few days before moving, and end up selecting the wrong place. Imagine if you could visit an apartment in VR and look around at your pace. This is one of the first applications that we have seen in our Weavr platform. The video below provides a Point Of View recording of the screen as someone is visiting the apartment in VR. And of course this is also available for view on any web browser using WebVR technologies.
VR tour of an apartment in England
Imagine if you could visit an apartment in VR and look around at your pace.
Exhibitions
A few days after our application went online on the Oculus store we were contacted by an educational institution in Abu Dhabi. They were planning for an exhibition where they would install a VR headset to provide visitors with the opportunity to explore their installations. Imagine you are looking for a school for yourself or for your kids, how could would it be to be able to see their labs, their libraries, their dorms without having to travel there before taking a decision? Again, below is a video with a POV screen capture of someone visiting the installations in VR.
Travel when you cant travel, AKA: Assisted Living and Hospitals
Also in the first weeks after our going live with the app, we were approached with two complementary ideas. As we were presenting this to one medical doctor she mentioned how it would be fantastic to have VR glasses to distract kids that are in the hospital for longer stays. She mentioned that often when their wounds had to be cared for, kids would have a traumatic moment when seeing their scars. She wants to distract them in Virtual Reality so that they do not have to go through these traumatic moments.
At about the same time one of our investors who is also involved in retirement homes (AKA, Assisted Living) approached us and told us that they would like to provide their residents with ways to visit places in VR. We call this “Travel when you can’t”. In a way with the goal to keep their minds active, but also with the forward looking idea of enabling their families to share immersive experiences of family moments that they can not attend anymore. Same as the social rooms where people gather to watch TV, they would now be traveling to different places. Again below a POV video with some of the travel stories we have in our categories.
Industrial applications
I have a friend who used to work at an airplane maintenance company. Already a few years ago they were looking at using Mixed Reality headsets to help their engineers and technicians to do maintenance work more efficient. They do work on planes by different makers and of different models. On one hand they wanted for the repair personal to be able to recall schematics and manuals on the mixed reality glasses, on the other they wanted to use the cameras on the glasses to document the repair work.
Industry is going to drive the adoption of virtual and mixed reality technologies. An example is a project that was done by our partner company Bitforge for a swiss mill. The goal was to enable everyone to travel inside the installations before they were built, so that the design could be tweaked and avoid expensive changes after construction.
Brand promotions
While we were still in Beta we got approached by some folks in the team of Martin Landstrom, who is a well known speaker and book author. They wanted to create an immersive story “A day in the life of Martin Landstrom” The idea being to show people all the preparation work necessary for such an event.
Imaging having an immersive experience with your favorite Basketball player?
We have now seen other similar requests. Imaging having an immersive experience with your favorite Basketball player? Or being at the best spot at that beach volleyball tournament?. Like these there are other experiences that are best experienced in VR, and that would connect personalities and brands to their followers.
Education
Augmented, Virtual and Mixed reality excel at helping us visualize stuff. It does not matter if its maps, body parts, airplane assemblies, the structure of molecules, or just made up visualization of complex data. If you are able to visualize it, you are able to understand it. Last Xmas I brought the Oculus home from the office and showed the new Google Maps to my wife.(Yes, this is possible if you follow this simple guide) My wife is the kind of person that gets lost easily. I still remember the emotion in her voice as she “flew” over some of the spots that she uses regularly. It was AHA moment after AHA moment: “Now I see, these streets are not really parallel, now wonder I always get lost”. She took over the headset to go back to her home town and fill in the blanks in her mental map. And you might think that that’s what you get if you use a normal map, but there are just some folks that are not wired to understand maps. On the other hand a 3D visualization is understood by everyone.
The video above illustrates the possibilities of AR/VR/MR in education with the Hololens application from Case Western Reserve University. I believe this will be an area where we will see many applications coming up helping students and normal folks understand complex concepts.
Conclusion
Andrej is right that there are not yet applications that make you want to use your VR headset on a daily basis. As with any new technology Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality are now going through a discovery stage. At Weavr we are approaching the field from the angle of story telling. We are seeing applications that make sense in the areas of:
- Real Estate
- Exhibitions
- Assisted Living and Hospitals
- Industry
- Brand promotions
- Education
We are sure that the developer community will stop producing nauseating games and start focusing on quality applications in relevant areas. If you are interested in experimenting with creating your own Virtual Reality experiences, check out our easy to use tools. We are looking forward to see what you create.
And Andrej Karpathy, as for AI in VR, that will be the topic of another post :-)