Emerging technologies; the 2020s will be the decade that they come of age. Augmented and virtual reality will transform communication, training and education. Quantum computing’s implications are at once both tremendously exciting and scary. Blockchain could transform the way we securely store and transfer records of the ownership of assets.
Emerging technologies: virtual and augmented reality
According to a report from P&S Market Research and available from Research and Markets, the global market for augmented and virtual reality is expected to reach $94.4bn by 2023. Further, augmented and virtual reality saw a market size of $14.84 billion in 2020, according to Valuates Reports, but are expected to see a combined revenue of $454.73bn by 2030.
The revolution in the immersive reality market is led by games and other consumer applications such as leisure — with the National Museum of Singapore for example applying AR to enhance tours of its museum.
But the business applications are emerging too. Jeremy Dalton, head of metaverse technologies at PwC told Information Age that AR can be a powerful tool for training, it can “inform you how to perform a certain procedure more accurately and more easily,” he said. Kelly Goetsch, chief strategy officer at commercetools said: “VR is a great way to take tours of very expensive things before you buy them.”
There is an important difference between virtual and augmented reality. Virtual reality provides a fully immersive experience, transporting you into a new environment, divorced from your existing environment, as if you are really there. For games, education, training, maybe even for applications such as surgery, it is formidable technology. Facebook has made a big bet on virtual reality with the purchase of Oculus Rift, it is calculated that we will conduct much of our future social media in virtual space — games and social interaction moulding together.
Apple, by contrast, has argued that augmented reality — in which information, computer graphics or even digital images and video are superimposed over reality — has a bigger future.
“In a few years, we’re not going to be able to imagine our lives without [AR]. It’s that profound a platform,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on US TV platform HBO.
Augmented reality will support long distance communication — hologram to hologram, supporting business meetings, even remote working, in which our holograms work side by side. Its implications are staggering.
The pandemic accelerated the shift to remote working, but while the debate rages on whether remote, hybrid or full-time office work is best, the augmented reality revolution moves close to a tipping point that could revolutionise remote work.
Virtual reality could also add a new dimension to remote work, for example supporting brain-storming sessions and replacing face to face communication with avatar to avatar communication replacing the serendipitous meeting by the water fountain with the serendipitous meeting in virtual space.
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