HTC VIVE releases headset that shows the future of VR is in enterprise

VIVE
Sync, a virtual reality collaboration and meeting application
from HTC VIVE
HTC
VIVE

• On Thursday, virtual reality company HTC VIVE announced
  its new headset called the Vive Focus, which is aimed at
  enterprises.
• Although VR has previously mostly been used for gaming,
  it is quickly growing for enterprise use.
• It can be used for business collaboration, training and
  education, such as teaching medical students about sleep apnea,
  showing car designers how to fix and prototype a car, and
  conducting remote meetings in a 3D virtual space.

As I put on a bulky white headset
and adjusted it to fit my head, I found myself in a hospital
room. One doctor leaned over a sleeping patient who had an air
pumping device on his nose, while another was preparing tools. I
felt like I was on an episode of “Grey’s
Anatomy.”

Suddenly, a floating robot head
appeared, explaining that we would be learning how to identify
and treat sleep apnea. It guided me towards the patient’s nose,
and before I knew it, I had jumped inside his nostril!

SimforHealth Sleep
Endoscopy Simulator
SimforHealth

This was a simulation from
SimforHealth, a French company that creates
virtual reality simulations for medical students and
pharmaceutical corporations. This simulation is supposed to teach
medical students about sleep apnea, guiding students inside a
virtual nose to show what happens to patients when they sleep. On
this simulation, the inside of a nose looked like a pulsing red
cave, with long, thin spikes coming out of the walls — nose
hairs, I assume.

Although virtual reality is
typically associated with consumers, such as for video gaming,
the technology is increasingly being adopted for use in
professional settings.
 VR
and
augmented reality are

 projected
to grow

to $162
billion by 2020, and more products are targeting enterprise
use.

SimforHealth Sleep
Endoscopy Simulator

Screen
Shot

On Thursday, the VR company HTC
VIVE announced its Vive Focus, an all-in-one
headset that includes storage, built-in speakers and more.
It’s targeted at businesses and can used for education and
training simulation, including at NASA and hospitals.

What makes this hardware
significant is that it’s much simpler and more portable for
customers to use, says Dan O’Brien, General Manager of the
Americas at HTC VIVE. Other VR headsets that only developers may
use might involve expensive hardware and require users to stay in
one place.

A user tries on the Vive
Focus, a VR headset from HTC VIVE
HTC
VIVE

The possibilities for this are
endless, O’Brien says. This could be used for surgical and
medical training, like when medical students might work together
to perform a virtual surgery. This could even be used for
automotive design, where employees can prototype and design cars
in VR, or even learn to fix cars. Innoactive, a German VR
enterprise software company, had partnered with Volkswagen to
create a training scenario for workers to learn to put together a
car in a factory.

“Executives are understanding
they can save time and money,” O’Brien said. “Their designers
don’t all have to fly to Germany to meet in one room and talk
about design. They can go to VR design room and talk
collaboratively there.”

VR can also be used to collaborate on code. Primitive, which
creates software development visualizations, created an app to
review code. When I tried out this simulation, I was transported
to a dark space with floating lines of code connected by a laser
web — a scene almost straight out of “The
Matrix.”

Primitive Code
Immersion

Screen
Shot

It showed me how different files
of code were linked, and with my laser pointer, I could pull up
an entire floating page of code in front of my eyes. With this
application, developers can work together to review code, circle
the parts they want to highlight and dig through open source
projects.

“It was quite fascinating because
I was not a software coder myself,” O’Brien said. “It’s also
about efficiency. When I sat in and watched 5 developers get in
the space together, they were having intense conversations about
the code.”

Read more:
How to pick out the best VR headset for you, even if you’ve never
experienced virtual reality before

In addition, VIVE had also
launched its own workforce collaboration tool built specifically
for enterprise called the VIVE Sync. This can be used to help
employees collaborate with each other in a virtual space,
especially when they work remotely. Each employee’s avatar can
share ideas, show presentations, import images, show videos and
more all in a 3D virtual space.

In the coming months, Vive plans
to launch developer kits to add to the headset so developers can
create their own applications for VR. Although the buzz around VR
has died down, O’Brien believes there will be tremendous growth
for VR in the enterprise space.

“We see it growing at a really
rapid rate,” O’Brien said. “We have seen consumer VR grow at a
healthy rate. Now enterprise is growing faster than
consumer.”

VIVE
Sync, a virtual reality collaboration and meeting application
from HTC VIVE
HTC
VIVE