When was the last time you were sitting in a meeting and looked around to see everyone looking at their phones or computers completely disinterested in what was going on around them? In reality they were probably doing work, but it can be annoying or even disheartening to see people spending so much time looking at their devices when you are trying to get work done. This is the problem with technology these days – the emphasis is on the technology rather than how it can enhance your life and work.
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Virtual reality is a perfect example of this. It’s kind of the attention seeker of the technology world, demanding your undivided attention at all times. Instead of enhancing your experiences it wants to dominate and control them, leaving no room left over for any other input. This is one of the reasons why, despite the fact that virtual reality has been around for decades, it has achieved low levels of adoption despite advances in technology and programming. You have to tune out the outside world in order to use virtual reality, and in many cases people even report getting motion sickness from it.
The technology that people are asking for right now is technology that isn’t hard to use and which blends seamlessly with their regular lives, offering some level of enhancement. This is where augmented reality comes in. Rather than taking over and demanding all your attention, augmented reality becomes part of your environment. Instead of playing a game with a bulky and expensive headset that tunes out the rest of the world augmented reality can project that game right on to your table top so that you can actually play with other people in the room without feeling like you are completely ignoring each other. That same tech can be used to make meetings more interactive - instead of every person using his or her own device, collaboration can be happening on the table top using a shared system.
That’s not to say there is no practical application for virtual reality - if Ready Player One ends up being a true prediction of the future we might need that escape some day. But as long as the world generally continues to improve people are going to want to reclaim more human interaction away from individual devices. Learn more about the future of augmented reality and the un-technology that will blend seamlessly with your environment from this infographic!
