Virtual reality helmets will get cooler and increase screen resolution. Graphics in VR games will definitely become more beautiful. Augmented reality on smartphones will become more realistic and faster. On PlayAmo, for example, gambling has never seemed so real in a virtual world. These evolutionary processes are the trends of any year. But 2020 has shown that the industry has more interesting ways to develop.
The trends of the next few years did not suddenly appear. Everything listed below has existed and has been developing for decades.
Virtual Offices
Having to stay at home almost all year because of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has suddenly made people take a closer look at VR. Many have switched to remote work and are faced with the fact that in isolation from the team, work is no longer so effective. Phone calls in Zoom do not completely solve the problem – via video communication, the feeling of presence is fully transmitted so-so. Because of this, many large companies have started talking about the need to create virtual offices in which people can interact with colleagues in virtual reality.
Even the main legislator of VR fashion – Facebook – has presented a ready-made solution – Infinite Office. Global testing of Zuckerberg’s virtual office is ongoing.
Learning in VR
The year 2020 clearly showed that education is the most promising area for the use of VR and AR. There have been advances in this direction before, but this direction attracted close attention when students around the world switched to remote learning due to the pandemic. It quickly became clear that video communication was not enough here either: not all professions can be mastered in this way, and the level of immersion in the educational process is not at all the same. This is where VR came to the rescue.
VR helps educate people in the most unexpected areas. What can we say about doctors and firefighters, on whose professional preparedness the lives of other people literally depend. The direction of VR-learning has been developing for many years, and there will undoubtedly be more such examples in the next year.
More Lightweight, Standalone and Wireless VR Headsets
To be honest, VR began to catch the attention of the masses when some helmets got rid of the so-called “base stations”. The average normal person doesn’t want to fill the room with cameras to chop cubes in Beat Saber a couple of times a week! The standard consumer also doesn’t want to build a $2,000 computer for VR, get tangled up in wires, and suffer neck pain caused by the weight of VR headsets. All of this has yet to be dealt with by the industry. And so more and more compact standalone helmets will be released, especially given the excellent start of Oculus Quest 2 at the end of 2020.
There are already examples, and Panasonic showed the brightest at the beginning of the year at CES-2020. Their device is not even a VR helmet, but VR glasses in a steampunk design. They are beautiful and very light, but still show super-high-definition images without a “mesh”, and even support HDR. But this is still a prototype – when the glasses go on sale is unknown. On similar grounds, the former head of HTC Peter Chow spoke, introducing the XRSpace Mova VR headset, the lightest among autonomous ones, according to the company. Huawei and many other companies also presented their device – the trend for lightweight and autonomous devices will intensify.
Apple will be part of the race. Recently, the famous ‘fruit’ company announced that it will break into virtual reality with ‘Reality One’, ‘Reality Pro’ and ‘Reality Processor’ products.
Apple’s next product line could start with a device called “Reality One”. An entity associated with the Cupertino company recently filed trademarks for “Reality One”, “Reality Pro” and “Reality Processor”.
Experts suggest that these names are a signal that Apple, like Meta*(Zuckerberg’s product), intends to actively work to create a metaverse and offer products and services.
Earlier in 2021, it was reported that Apple engineers are working on a speed boost that has 12 cameras that track the movement of the user’s head, as well as the ability to perform an action that makes it possible to follow the movement of the eyeballs. Its price could be in the order of $ 3,000.
Concerts, Museums and Travel in VR
Another consequence of the global pandemic era. The story here is the same as that of VR training and virtual offices. You can look at reproductions in Google Images, watch a kayak on a river on YouTube or a concert of your favorite band, but the feeling of presence will not be the same. Therefore, in 2020, many event organizers jumped in and started organizing VR broadcasts of everything in a 360-degree format. At a time of the most severe restrictions, this has greatly helped the concert, museum and tourism industries not to throw back their hooves. Needless to say, even the famous Burning Man festival was also held in VR format in 2020!
Although the transfer of live shows and museum exhibitions to the virtual space was spurred on by the pandemic, the phenomenon is unlikely to disappear after it: it turned out to be very convenient, inexpensive and immersive. In addition, the direction has huge potential for growth. For example, museums can organize interactive VR performances. Art has been friends with virtual and augmented reality for a long time. And there are interesting options for concerts: remember Travis Scott’s performance in Fortnite? Now imagine the same thing, but only in VR! In general, VR events can become not a substitute for real ones, but a separate self-sufficient experience and a large industry.
We Will Hear the Term XR More and More Often
XR stands for Extended Reality, that is, enhanced, extended reality. This is not a new technology, but a collective term that includes everything at once – virtual reality in helmets, augmented reality in glasses and smartphones, and all the software and opportunities that these technologies provide. The term was coined by marketers back in 2019 and has been used more and more often since then.
Why is it needed? But for convenience! After all, VR and AR technologies are getting closer and closer to each other and are striving for complete unification, and in the future we will hear about it more and more often.