Essay on Virtual Reality: Emerging Trends and Business Impacts

This essay delves into the evolving landscape of virtual reality, examining its emerging themes and their profound impacts on organizations. The discussion encompasses several key areas, including virtual events, virtual reality lite (360-degree video), mobile VR, and the integration of social media as a gateway to VR experiences. The essay analyzes how these trends influence various sectors, projecting their effects over the next five years. It highlights the potential for cheaper and more portable VR headsets, the evolution of VR as a dominant computing platform, and the increasing ability to tailor data feeds within virtual environments. Furthermore, the essay explores the implications for business strategy, particularly in the context of project collaboration and remote work. The conclusion summarizes the benefits VR offers to organizations and its projected improvements over the next five years.

Running Head: VIRTUAL REALITY
VIRTUAL REALITY
Name of the Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

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Introduction
Virtual reality describes the simulation of bits of the world. This is done by using
sensory equipments such as gloves, headsets and computers that provides high performance.
Along with entertainment and games, virtual reality is also being used for providing training to
pilots as well as surgeons. Virtual reality has many emerging themes and they have their own
impacts on organizations (Earnshaw 2014). The essay discusses the emerging themes and their
impacts on organizations. It further discusses their effects on sectors over five years.
Discussion
The five emerging themes of virtual reality and their impact on organizations are as follows
The virtual event: According to Workers Accommodation and Angle (2018) virtual
reality events have become very popular nowadays. Virtual reality keeps regular track of position
of bodies involved in it. This is the reason why it is being used by many fields. Some sporting
events such as Super Bowl Li and Rio Olympics have been using virtual reality. Virtual reality
allows the remote audience to experience an event in real; it makes them feel as if they are
watching it live. Virtual reality gives a much closer view than ever before. Virtual reality events
create opportunity of partnership for various organizations. This helps in co branding of these
organizations (Workers Accommodation and Angle 2018). It excites the viewers to have a live
experience of events. This virtual event helps the organizations to promote themselves and
increase their popularity.
Virtual reality Lite: According to Landowska, Royle and Eachus, (2018) 360-degree
video has become very popular recently. For audience 360 degree video has been a lower barrier

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in order to enter than full Virtual reality (Landowska Royle and Eachus 2018). This needs only a
mobile to experience virtual world. One more area where 360 degree has become very popular is
venue tours. This has been helpful for event planners who are involved in venue research. This
might not be as helpful as going there in real, but it helps largely (Landowska, Royle and Eachus
2018). This has helped the travel and tourism companies to post 360-degree videos regarding
various places. People who plan to visit there may have watch the video for once and decide
accordingly.
Mobile VR: According to Wang and Komuro, (2015) in mobile VR the entry point for
VR is the user’s phone. The range of options of VR for the people using mobile is huge. These
options include Snapchat’s VR Lite and Samsung’s Gear VR. Nowadays everyone can access
VR to some extent through his or her mobiles (Wang and Komuro 2015). Mobile VR helps
organizations to increase the viewers of their events. People who are not able to attend the events
can watch it through their mobiles. This helps in promotion of the organizations.
Social media, a gateway to VR: According to O’Brolcháin, Jacquemard and Monaghan,
(2016) social media is recently proving to be a gateway for the events that are streamed live.
Many social media platforms are providing live view of events. Platform like Snapchat has
provided unique view of Golden Globes with the help of their spectacles (O’Brolcháin,
Jacquemard and Monaghan 2016). This helps the social media platforms to be more famous and
attracts more viewers of the events. Social media also provides a control back to the users. This
way many events can utilize the gateway provided by social media platforms. These platforms
include Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and many more (O’Brolcháin, Jacquemard and Monaghan
2016). These sites help in promoting their events. Implementing this in a proper way can be very
beneficial for organizations.

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The affects of the themes on sector over next five years
Over five years or a decade Virtual reality headsets may become very cheap as well as
portable. It may also replace smart phones as tech industry’s one of the most dominating
computing platforms (Venieris 2017). Virtual reality has been ranked as the biggest trends that
have become popular. Just like mobile devices are enjoyed by users nowadays. Over five years
VR might allow a continuous connection to enterprise networks or to the internet (Venieris
2017). People would not need to use the phone physically. They just have to wear VR glasses in
order to get access to their phones. Over five years the design would be such that they would be
comfortable to use, the digital devices would be self-contained and free of wires. They would
also avoid using bulky batteries in order to run the devices.
In some cases during virtual meetings with the colleagues, some advertisement might pop
up. These advertisements interrupt the meeting as well as the concentration of the colleagues. In
mobile phones, the advertisements can be skipped or the ringer volume can be decreased
(Wexelblat 2014). Popup can be blocked while surfing net. With the help of VR people would be
able to control the data feeds that appear in virtual environments. This would be a bit crucial, but
in the future, the ability of traffic cop will allow tailoring the data feeds (O’Brolcháin,
Jacquemard and Monaghan 2016). This would be done according to the preferences of the users,
activities or locations.
The implications for the formulation of business strategy include project collaboration.
For creating virtual spaces VR allows the users to work in a group (Wexelblat 2014). They are
also allowed to collaborate with the spaces. The remote workers would not have to struggle for

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sharing the screen in order to point out a problem (Venieris 2017). VR would allow the members
of a video conference to look around and see the other members taking part in it. This would be a
potential use case. This would be allowed to the people who have access to the VR (Wexelblat
2014). The cost of the VR keeps dropping; along with this its ability to collaborate with business
grows at a high rate.
Conclusion
From the above report it can be concluded that Virtual reality has been of a great help to
various organizations. There are many recent trends regarding VR that has been very helpful for
branding as well as promoting brands. These trends have been discussed in the discussion part of
the essay. It also includes the impacts of these trends on organizations. This essay also discusses
regarding the improvement in the Virtual Reality technology over the next five years.

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References
Earnshaw, R.A. ed., 2014. Virtual reality systems. Academic press.
Landowska, A., Royle, S., Eachus, P. and Roberts, D., 2018. Testing the Potential of Combining
Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy with Different Virtual Reality Displays—Oculus Rift and
oCtAVE. In Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (pp. 309-321). Springer, Cham.
O’Brolcháin, F., Jacquemard, T., Monaghan, D., O’Connor, N., Novitzky, P. and Gordijn, B.,
2016. The convergence of virtual reality and social networks: threats to privacy and autonomy.
Science and engineering ethics, 22(1), pp.1-29.
Venieris, D., 2017. The virtual reality of welfare reform. In Social Policy Developments in
Greece (pp. 89-112). Routledge.
Virtual Reality & the Events Industry Following on from our previous blog on the Top 6 Event
Industry Trends for 2017 and our mention of Virtual Reality becoming more
popular during this year, p., Workers, H., Accommodation, S. and Angle, R. 2018. Virtual
Reality & the Events Industry | Right Angle Events. [online] Rightangleevents.co.uk.
Wang, L. and Komuro, T., 2015, March. Three-dimensional VR interaction using the movement
of a mobile display. In Virtual Reality (VR), 2015 IEEE (pp. 363-364). IEEE.
Wexelblat, A. ed., 2014. Virtual reality: applications and explorations. Academic Press.