What is it?
Broadly describes any technology that allows users to immerse themselves in a digital world. Its current iteration, typically delivered via a head-mounted display, allows users to experience situations that are removed from their physical location.
Why is it important?
Allowing users to immerse themselves in situations removed from their current physical location opens up a myriad of opportunities for the advancement of learning technology. By employing virtual reality in the learning process trainers and instructors now possess the ability to place learners in a training environment that is analogous to a real scenario without exposing them to risk or incurring the expense associated with real-world training.
Why does a business professional need to know this?
Virtual Reality (VR) will increasingly become part of a suite of new technologies that will shape the future of business. Aside from opportunities offered in the training space, it will present new ways of working.
From training to meeting to interfacing with computers in general, virtual reality comes with the promise of a new computing paradigm. Business professionals should know this term as it will increasingly form part of how their organizations operate.
In the learning and development space, virtual reality has the potential to revolutionize how people learn. By taking concepts and technologies that were once the sole preserve of fighter pilots and bringing them to the factory floor, virtual reality offers the potential for deployable simulation training for all.
Virtual reality can be presented in a small, light, and portable form factor via an affordable head-mounted display. These headsets currently track the user’s head and hands as they move in the real world in order to enable them to interact with a virtual, computer-generated world in a realistic way.
Virtual reality is a subset of immersive technology which also includes Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). Immersive technologies can also include non-headset-based options such as immersive projection rooms or wrap-around large-scale visual displays.
References
- (VRS 2017) What is virtual reality?: Virtual Reality Society. (2017).