While VR for consumers lags, Corporate Training booms

I'm a gamer. Always have been, always will be. So when I discovered room-scale VR (my first was Valve's Longbow using Vive), the kid inside me basically went nuts. I felt like I was 9 years old again, playing DooM for the first time. Holy crap!! So naturally, I immediately dropped everything I was doing (supermathworld.com, which was lagging as a startup anyway) to pursue VR full time. "GAMES!" I thought. "I'm going to make the most awesome and mind blowing games possible with this new technology."

"Except, no, wait a minute, we're an adult remember? We don't just blindly put all our time and energy into something because it's fun. We need a career - we need to add value to the world in a way that pays our rent and propels us forwards in the industry," my subconscious pleaded. Fine, fine, I guess I'll look at where the money is. So for the next six months (until present day, January 2018) I did.

I found the money!

Surprising no one, the money for making applications with this fresh shiny new tech is selling it to Big Clients. It turns out that Big Clients -- Cisco, Department of Defense, Siemens, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Amazon -- have a huge, immediate need for VR. Why?

Training & Psychology

Virtual Reality has the power to do a lot that traditional, flat apps cannot. You can run around your room, jump up and down, wave your hands frantically, and the game notices and reacts to this. Swinging a club no longer means pressing A or clicking the mouse; you literally swing a club. That's of some interest to corporate training regimens that have to do with picking up and manipulating items (basically, as my friend Cory put it: "If you do your job standing up, you need to be trained in VR.") But it's not just movement that VR allows -- it's psychology.

Imagine the most vivid dream you've ever had.

You wake up, and you remember every detail. It feels so real! It takes your mind a moment to adjust to reality. You let go of the worries and stories that were in progress in the dream. "It was just a dream," you remember, as it fades away. Now compare that to reading a pamphlet or watching a video about someone else who had that dream.

Which experience would be more impactful to you -- reading about it, or dreaming it yourself? I posit that the answer is obvious. This means that for Big Clients is that their training can take less time and achieve more effective results.

• Doctors can simulate what it's like to be patients, resulting in higher empathy and confidence, resulting in lower doctor-patient turnover.
• Employees taking diversity training can feel what it's actually like to be harassed, resulting in fewer yearly incidents.
• Soldiers who were surprised and killed multiple times in the simulation will be psychologically ready for real battle.
• Industrial engineers handling hazardous materials can experience statistically common failure points happen during a "regular" exercise.
• Doctors can train on complicated medical devices with no consequences to the virtual patients when something goes wrong.

Long story short, a training experience in VR will inherently be better than any pamphlet or video you could ever consume, and this can have a direct financial impact on the organization, both on training budget and employee effectiveness.