What AR or VR innovation are you most excited to see in 2017, and how can this be used to help your business?
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Better User Experience for Prospects
Google Cardboard and some of the other VR platforms are ripe to use in businesses to help create a better user experience for your prospects and customers. Imagine how VR could be used to show customers and prospects an in-depth look at your business’s products or services. It is immersion at its best, and it will create an amazing user experience that won’t be easily forgotten.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
2. Changing Training Methods
The first generation of productivity-oriented virtual reality headsets is here, such as Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap, which seek to increase work productivity by offering interactive, mixed-reality environments for getting work done. This type of technology may allow us to host virtual training sessions remotely that are more interactive and engaging than traditional on-site training sessions.
– Russell Kommer, eSoftware Associates Inc
3. New Narrative Opportunities
Beyond entertainment applications, VR has incredible potential for education and as a storytelling tool. As the technology to capture stories becomes more accessible, it will be exciting to see how it’s used to create new types of narratives. From a business perspective, using VR to encourage exploration of new places can be useful to reframe design and tech problems.
– Marcelino Alvarez, Uncorked Studios
4. Immersive Experiences
2017 will see increased adoption of augmented reality devices among the masses. This will even trump VR adoption, since AR will be accessible through mobile devices and won’t need any additional hardware. This will give businesses a chance to better engage consumers through immersive experiences that are not limited to games, all they need to do is get assistance from an augmented reality app development company.
5. Improved Medical Care and Training
Despite the declining popularity of Pokemon Go, AR has proven that it has real world applications outside of simple entertainment. Already AR has entered the medical space as a tool to teach and prepare young med students for surgery. As AR becomes more and more advanced and accessible, it is exciting to see the impact it will have on various industries.
6. Virtual Shopping Options
As a retailer, we’re actively preparing for AR and VR. We are not far from putting on headsets in our home or office and “walking” into a store, trying on clothes and seeing what they look like in person. Through our connected devices, we will know what fits us from each store. Get ready for one-blink checkout.
7. Remote Collaboration
There are lots of AR and VR innovations I’m excited about, but the ones most relevant to the workplace are those around remote collaboration. Being able to sit in the same virtual room as your employees around the globe and work together in real time will revolutionize business.
– Simon Berg, Ceros
8. Actionable Insights
Our brains process huge amounts of data and condense it to actionable insights. When a ball is pitched, we know when and where to swing the bat. I’d love to see AR tools leverage smart devices and cloud computing to do the same thing for a wider range of data than our senses provide. For our businesses, that might mean overlaying performance and maintenance data over servers in our data center.
– Justin Blanchard, ServerMania Inc.
9. Convenient Venue Selection
Integrating VR into our daily business world is a very exciting prospect. As it stands, we can sometimes do 10-20 venue walk-throughs per event before choosing one. Doing detailed VR walk-throughs from the comfort of our office would increase efficiency exponentially. By conducting these crucial site visits remotely, we would save time and money while still gaining the same valuable information.
– Justin Lefkovitch, Mirrored Media
10. Memory Assistance
As someone who meets hundreds or thousands of people each year, I am looking forward to a practical AR solution that helps me remember important details about the people I meet and the things we talk about.
