It’s taken a little longer for virtual reality to take off than many observers expected. Back in the 1990s, technology magazines (remember those?) were filled with predictions that we’d all be walking around wearing virtual reality headsets by the year 2000. Unfortunately, the technology really wasn’t ready by this point and the main impact of VR headsets was that they made a lot of people feel sick. Fortunately, most of those issues have now been ironed our and virtual reality is ready to go mainstream. In this article, we’ll take a look at a few of the possibilities that virtual reality has to offer over the next decade or so.
Virtual reality holidays
Air travel has opened up the world to millions of people but it’s also a significant drain on the planet’s limited environmental resources. Virtual reality will allow people to visit any city in the world and experience new cultures from the comfort of their own home. If you do genuinely want to visit a place then virtual reality will allow you to get the lowdown on it before you even make a booking, meaning that you can be confident in the travel plans that you make.
Virtual reality casinos
Online gambling has introduced millions of people to games like poker without the need to visit a casino that can often be far away and expensive to get to. Virtual reality is the next logical step in this process. It will remove the slightly impersonal feeling that can come from gaming online and drop players straight into the heart of any game that they are playing. Modern camera technology may well revolutionise the world of online poker by making it possible for players to study their opponents’ faces and read their intentions just like they would in a normal casino. VR truly has the potential to revolutionise the way that we play games online.
Virtual reality meetings
Anyone who has ever spent hours sitting on a conference call will agree that the medium could do with a little work. Virtual reality will offer all the advantages of meeting people face to face without the expensive and time-consuming travel and the need to be out of the office that goes alongside it. You’ll be able to sit at a virtual meeting table with your colleagues and watch people present, give talks and discuss things just as though you were in a real meeting room. The virtual environment will make it much easier to engage in the meeting and avoid the type of drift that is typical in many long conference calls. Virtual reality meetings have the potential to be many people’s first experience of the technology as it is likely that companies will be able to invest in advanced headsets before households.
The future of VR looks like it might have finally arrived and the potential applications look like they could be virtually unlimited. Only time will tell quite how big an impact virtual reality technology has on our lives.
