The Future of VR for Business
So, hi Romano nice to see you again, hello Michele yeah, it's really great to see you again. So we had a long discussion and on VR and today I invited Christoph to be a part of our discussion because as you as you remember in fact we Christoph we talked a lot about how we can use VR and how businesses could use it and Romano came out up with a lot of questions and his own impressions of what you could do you want to talk about how the future looks like correct exactly we get a really a great response on the video on LinkedIn that was really amazing and I also got quite a lot of questions from different people how this VR is really working and where this VR is going in in the future and is this sort of the new normal are going and I think this is something we definitely need to discuss today in in this in this talk yeah in fact even the lots of visitors coming in they ask well is this the right moment isn't this too big for us or is this technology too far away we know it's the right timing but Christoph what do you think is it the right moment and where is it heading yeah it's an it's an interesting question I think we're definitely seeing an incredible amount of adoption in the enterprise and in business for virtual reality and this has not been the case I would say a year and a half or even a year ago this this level of engagement we're seeing from users and the adoption rate I think we've hit really an inflection point with this technology in the last six months and it's certainly a great time to inform yourself about what is possible where it's still early enough that there is still a long way to go and a lot of new opportunities to look into both as an organization or as a provider or expert in the field but I think what we are seeing is that it's at the same time what we are noticing in this technology working with clients that it matured from a prototype to real product in the last six months and this is really a different world yeah how was the speed I mean we met nearly four years ago and we had the project together and I do remember in fact we still had cables we had a computer we had sensors in the room we needed about a space of three by three meters to do the work seeing what we have here today is completely different how do you see the pace of VR development going on yeah it's difficult to compare the old way how VR meetings were it felt a little bit like you were always setting up a home gym every time you wanted to jump into VR and this is it's just so much easier now there's so much less friction involved in the process and this actually allows the things that work to work at scale at scale in an enterprise in different processes in different departments and I think this is one of the exciting parts we've seen the emergence of hardware that is user-friendly and available at scale use cases that are replicable and the entire software ecosystem maturing so within the last four years there has been an incredible amount of change I would argue that the last 12 months were really pivotal for VR and there's a lot more coming yeah I think a lot of innovation left yeah I think Romano the question that business has is in fact how can I use it do I need to use it correct exactly so many of the people are asking of course the question what are really the use cases I can do with that and what is the business case of exactly doing this for example why should I do all the educations in here rather than with zoom and what are also the implications with that or what are the benefits and also the advantages of doing that yeah I think with as with every new technology you always have you know it it's still it's the second or third generation of you know modern virtual reality if you want to call it this way that that we're seeing right now and it's developing very rapidly which means there are still some you know there are still some downsides we talk about user-friendly hardware but it's still a device I have to put on my hand you know it's still a device I have to manage setup and you know a lot of the solutions while a lot of things happened in the last 12 months there's also plenty of things that it doesn't support perfectly yet so what we have to look at is what are these early use cases that actually provide real business value right now because that in five to ten years you know they're you know we could transition entirely to spatial computing as a as a platform I think there's a lot of thesis around that and a lot of exciting things in the work but where is it right now and the exciting thing is that in we see a particular set of use cases where virtual reality is right now providing not a gimmick not a not an entertainment device or a wow factor to get us out of you know boring zoom calls for once or boring video conferences for once we're actually seeing true value being generated by this tool and one of the examples I think is if you wanted to conduct a real workshop with a team in in virtual reality if you have 20 people and you actually want to make a decision think about how this looks in a video conference where you know you have one person speaking at a time you have one piece of information being shared at a time it doesn't really have this level of collaboration and this aspect of you know dynamism that you want to have in a team and if you transition if you make the move into VR the R.O.I you can receive on using this technology with you know the aforementioned downsides that you actually need to have a device and need to equip people with this device yeah the payback time is incredibly fast because what you can replicate in this space especially for more complex meetings especially for meetings where we really want to discuss a lot of data or make a complex decision or have the need that we split up into groups right on a whiteboard and have this you know parallel work this very natural way of working and coming to a decision that is purely agile and very immersive and very focused this is something where VR really shines right now yeah and I think Romano you were also saying it's also for networking exactly yeah it's absolutely great I’m sitting here at the table having here my coffee cup and it feels actually like I’m really sitting at the table with you guys and just having a discussion but also knowing that you guys are miles away from me but it really feels personal as if I’m really talking with you at this table in in this place and I think this is a whole new level of interrelationship between the people which enables us to do all those things and that's really great you're exactly on the on the right track here Romano because this is the foundation of VR you know it's not that we have now a better camera for a video call or a better microphone where you hear me better it's in itself a completely different way how it feels to be together here and arguably you know this is a very simple VR meeting we're having right now and already this feels a lot more intimate it feels like we're connecting on a much deeper level and it would be easy for us to break out and you know start working more in intensively and more focused on some other topics and this is really one of these benefits that we're seeing in VR this sense of belonging this immersion this presence that you feel builds the foundation and then we can have a lot of benefits you know stacking up on top of this foundation that Romano you mentioned this feeling of presence that we have and that's perhaps another thing we have been discussing that the last meeting with Romano space is getting a different value now until now we have big companies with lots of numbers of square meters now especially in the last months they could not use it so it was just empty space and this space here is replicable as much as you want but with a different cost yeah correct yeah absolutely and this is this is one of the of the factors and we also see space in in bigger cities is getting more and more expensive and even if you want to have real good meeting rooms with a lot of space where you have also the white boards and perhaps also some big screen TVs in there it costs quite a lot of our money and with that you just get tons of space that you can need and also you have a different possibilities of a drawing of moving options around and that's really cool in here yeah now from this point now I mean business is going to have demands on what it needs yeah so we have want to be interactive we want to exchange and collaborate what I think could be the implications on the industry coming from business well that's a that's a broad question I think if you look at the needs of an enterprise or a business in virtual reality I don't think anybody wants a glorified video conference it's you know it's not about providing a VR solution where you can you can share a screen and then we can all look at the screen and basically do what we do on our laptops normally just in VR this is not good enough this will not create the value for an organization to actually go through this change management process to adopt this technology and use it at a certain scale so for us it's about two elements it's compatibility with the existing work ecosystem that is one part you cannot create VR as an island of productivity where you neither get any data in or out you won't be successful with this it needs to be fluently integrated with your normal work and there needs to be a way that is not you know zero one not binary there needs to be a smooth transition where it can move more and more work streams as needed towards VR and adopt it and I think solutions therefore need to be built with a lot of foresight how even the concept of space is being used I we sometimes talk about cognitive bandwidth here in VR which just covers the idea of how much information can we handle in a VR meeting compared to you know even me working individually on my laptop or my workstation at home and instead of cramming a lot of this data on small screens you can you can spread it out you can you know use it in a much more consumable format you can just turn our heads and see a presentation here turn our heads to the right see a whiteboard there and I think the approach that businesses want solutions that understand the benefits of VR and can utilize these advantages these fundamental advantages VR give us but the challenge is to find a way between connecting having a certain level of synergy with the existing way of doing business without compromising what we do in VR so we want to be able to work seamlessly with the data we are used to be working at least at the very beginning but we don't want this data to cause the VR experience to be limited and I think this is the challenge and this is a very you know product centric question to VR like how do I work in here do I work with whiteboards which are concepts from the physical world we bring in to work with post-it notes to work with you know screen sharing do I dial into meetings how does this look so it's a lot of questions that you need to get right even just to reach one usable use case in an organization where do you think then is this then moving is let's say VR going to be normal I mean the new normal we are going to meet in well we wake up in the morning and go instead of going to the office put up our glasses we'll definitely will not be like they are today I prese we're going to have a quite a fast development there where do you see us moving the next well let's say years I think work is changing and the global pandemic has you know is credited to have initiated a lot of digital adoption I think a lot of companies rather realize how dependent there still are on geography on physical brick-and-mortar offices for their productivity there's been a great study from BCG that has said that while individual productivity wasn't so affected from home offices collaboration was greatly affected the majority of people the super majority of people say that their collaboration levels decreased yeah and this means I think for me it's rather world where there's a very dystopian world to saying we're submitting ourselves to the matrix I where everything becomes very in inane I don't think this is so I think this is very personal what we have and I don't think the goal the goal of VR is to replace all sorts of actual interactions I see I see we are much more as a tool for us to reduce our geographic dependency I think in 20 years we'll look back and see the current times and even you know the years before as barbaric if you ask me this people had to move to small cities because they had to they had to pick between family and jobs and you know so many people that were forced to change their lives because of their careers and I think this is not going to be the future I think employers will be able to work with anyone they want no matter where they are in the world and yeah it's going to be become a lot more equal yeah I think Romano that was also a point this collaboration I mean you can feel it in your company and with your clients that collaboration has gone dramatically down and that's why you said we need more places to connect exchange how do you see that then exactly I also see that during this pandemic what I really miss is having the physical contact with my friends with the family and also me with my colleagues and what I really miss is just having a coffee at the coffee machine with my colleagues just having a chat with them everything is quite focused on meetings and that that we need to organize there are no informal meetings anymore or just a chat somewhere and that's a little bit the downside that that I see but what I can clearly see when I look at the VR there is a quite a possibility that you have a space somewhere where you can meet the people and where you can talk to them and I was also and yesterday at the at the meet up in in VR and it was it was really cool that you just kind of walk to the people to a table and just have a chat with them and the interesting thing is when you have a chat with them suddenly you think you know these people you can hear them you sort of can feel them and this is this is a real cool thing and in my opinion this this is the future where we are going of course we also had that discussion before you will not be eight hours in in VR you will be in VR for special meetings that that you will have and of course there are other meetings where you just use the other tools that we have for meetings because these are the tools for one type of meetings and VR is the tool for another type of meetings yeah that is what we wrote in a blog about the employer of the future we call him will be an S.L.H so he will have a smartphone a laptop and then a VR headset depending on what he needs or she needs to communicate choosing the right option but now VR is definitely more than just let's say a luxury option or just something well it's nice and fancy but it's really more productive and engaging yeah right yeah absolutely so the what could be let's say the fear of a business to get in touch with VR what do you think Romano why don't we see at everyone coming in and asking where do you see some hurdles at the moment at the moment I see one of the hurdles is of course that you need to have that device I think that that's at the moment the biggest hurdle that that I can see also when I discuss with my friends so what I could imagine is when we have also software which works on the normal pcs where you can simulate sort of the VR I think the adoption will increase of course and what I also see quite clearly is we don't know yet what kind of meetings we want to have in VR and which meetings we should have outside of we are with the auto tools and I think we need to have sort of an answer of course by making some experiments with that to find out what works best in VR and what does not work in in VR and I think this is something we really need to find out yeah but this I think is definitely then tasks for people like Christoph or us to support in fact companies to get in touch with VR how to use it because I think Christoph what is also correct you cannot just take real life into virtual one to one so there needs a certain interpretation a certain way of how do you get a certain emotion in it and it is about emotions VR is a lot about psychology so you need to know what effect does a place like this have sitting here practicing on top of the mountain and looking downside to the lake how does it affect the way of how we work how we interact do we need a small room a big room am I correct Kristof yeah it's I think the entire tea of businesses is learning how to use this technology and this is just a process it's the essence of an emerging technology that you know not everybody is perfectly informed about what works what doesn't work and there is always you know historically probably this this looked very sci-fi and very far away yes and most people that we meet in VR are actually surprised how easy it is at the end to get started with how little friction there is to have a first workshop in virtual reality just to try it out and see does this use case work not every use case works perfectly in every organization the same way it doesn't another one and I think this is what I really think is great in the current climate of you know businesses searching for ways to connect more globally and reinvent the way they're working I think it's great to see the openness to new ideas and this is something that was not always given and is I think changing and I can confirm that in fact most of our clients sometimes we have guests coming in just they want to know how it is that when they come in they are a person having a certain view on VR when they go out it's completely changed its 180 degrees change seeing VR from a different perspective and as you said it's very easy that might be the biggest hurdle that even on a video like this you can't you actually have to see what you can you have to see you have to you have to experience it and you know that that's probably the thing that if you didn't need the device you couldn't be in this in this in this media so it's a little bit you know you can't really navigate around it it's certainly the thing that would stop incredibly fast adoption you know if everybody would know how it works immediately and you didn't have to put them in a headset what I find interesting is you know we're looking at data on our end and you know Romano to your point it's interesting to see we we're now defining these activation moments in clients we work with where we say you know it sticks at this point there's a point at which this is no longer exploration but implementation of the technology and I think this changed a lot in the last 12 months the activation moment is a lot clearer it's a lot faster and the conversion rate if you want to call it of people who after this first in our case it's very often either a social event you actually hold as a first larger team meeting or you know a workshop or a strategic presentation it's one of these types of meetings that you organize once in VR with your team and the conversion rate of how many people then actually say hey I would like to do this in a different setting in my team it's incredibly high so it's about getting people comfortable with taking this first step having great advisors that can take them and explain to them the industry and the solutions and the downsides and the upsides and it's a lot about people to experience it I think those are the elements that why many people might not yet might see this further away than it actually is yeah that's also my impression that that I have I also have a lot of colleagues and I show them my video and also explain them what we are doing and we are now also trying this out at our company and we also plan now a sort of a team event in in VR which is which is absolutely great and more and more people of my colleagues are buying these at these glasses because they see really the benefit in it and to use them and I think this is really great but my question to you is also when we look in in the future for me it looks like we are at the tipping point of this technology and now really the whole thing starts to move in my opinion I think in in six months or in in within a year we will see quite a lot of meetings or of things coming up in VR what is your opinion on that we're in the first row together you know with Michaela and the team I think for us this this point is already happening so we see exponential growth it's just the thing with exponential growth is that at the very beginning it looks like a flat curve even though it's growing very quickly just because you know the entire market of work is so huge but I completely agree with you Romano that there is a there's a transition happening towards adopting this at larger scale maybe not rolling it out entirely so everybody immediately has a headset but you know having about 100 headsets in your organization to support critical events and team meetings internally in different teams that's a good starting setup that we're seeing happening across many industries and organizations also different sizes of organizations happening so for us it's really it has been for now a couple months accelerating and accelerating how the industry has adopted this yeah cool I think it's a good view on what is coming up say to close down Romano what would you be your closing sentence and perhaps also invitation to who is listening and watching regarding VR my recommendation to all of the people who are watching is just try it out because it's really great and it's also great opportunity especially now in this pandemic which will take some time unfortunately but I think now it's the right time to try that out and have some meetings or even a coffee with some people in a virtual reality this is absolutely great try to start experimenting and try to experiment in new ways of working because in my opinion this can really be the enabler of new cool stuff which is going on and I think right now this train of of VR is just starting to roll and in my opinion don't miss this opportunity and don't be late for that train Christoph what would you say I would just sign whatever Romano just said I think this is a perfect summary there's a there's a tipping point there's an inflection point the industry hit and if you if you as an organization don't have virtual reality or spatial content concepts of working together on your map right now I think it's arguably certainly time to look into this and to start talking to vendors and solution providers and inform yourself because a lot of companies are adopting this not as a gimmick as a critical tool that enables them to work faster make decisions quicker in a more informed way and quite frankly just have more flexibility with whom t how teams can be structured globally yeah I would also like so to close it's in fact smart working for the future is VR so be brave and do the step I think if you are as you say in the first wave you will make let's say a nice tour if you're just waiting for the wave to move along it will be difficult to follow guys it was very nice to have you here and I hope to see you again in our places and looking forward to a VR future coming up.
2021-03-03 20:24
