As a conceptual designer, organizations often ask me if I can advise them on how to use VR in their context. It’s a question that comes from the perceived need to get with the latest technology or else, lag behind. VR and AR – or any technology for that matter – shouldn’t be a gimmick to be applied to the business processes just to show you’re up to speed with the latest innovation. In many cases, it’s not. The people that ask me do have a genuinely good idea how VR or AR could help their business, and more than not it’s a very sound one. But the exact use case and what AR/VR can do precisely for them remains a haze. It’s not unusual because as relatively unknown as these technologies still are to the broader public, they do come with some caveats. The same old reservations often recur:

–> VR has no functional added value for my business.
–> VR is too expensive.
–> There are tools on the market that do what I need.
–> VR is not scalable, with every project I have to start from scratch.
–> I am completely dependent on an expert to create and manage my VR project.

Do these preconceptions hold true? The answer is – as with everything in life – not black and white. These arguments often arise from ignorance about the technology, which is why – as always – master Pimp. sheds some light in the darkness. So let’s tackle them, one by one.

VR has no added value for my business.

VR is fun, it lures your customers and shows them you’re up with the latest technologies. Being an AR/VR evangelist myself and running a business in it, I can honestly tell that most of the time, VR really has no added value for your business. At least not in that sense that it gives your customer something she really needs. While AR can have far more functional use cases – being a technology that adds a virtual component to a physical environment (think adding a virtual guide above a physical machine for operators) – virtual reality places the user completely inside a virtual environment. The use case for doing that should be convincing enough to opt for it. 

When you’re a real estate promotor and you want to immerse your customers in the appartment you’ll build for them, it makes sense to simulate a virtual representation of it. When you’re a science museum for kids and you want to let them experience the Roman period, it makes sense to create a VR experience with Romans running about. In fact, most customers do know when VR makes a case, but what they often forget is that the same VR has to be made user-friendly enough to be used, in order to add real value. 

We built a VR assessment training for VDAB, the Flemish organization for work intermediation, to assess workers in the construction industry. The experience was a sort of game where the candidate had to follow some steps, choose between options and actually perform actions like placing rooftiles or installing a sink. The use case was very clear and utterly useful, but the result we built was just too hard to use, due in part to the restrictions the hardware offers (It was the first version of the Oculus) and due to the fact that the UX required too many actions a user is not comfortable enough with.

Thus, it adds no real value. Remember that people really have no affordance with VR, putting on glasses is a threshold and using a controller is too far outside their comfort zone. Asking them to perform actions, especially in the presence of onlookers puts them in a stress. It more often than not results in a product that gathers dust in some corner. Thus, no added value. Does this close the case? Far from it. I’m just saying think really good about the use case and where and if VR fits in.

VR is too expensive.

Whether VR is expensive depends on several factors. How big and resolution-heavy should your 3D environment be? How much 3D content is available to start with? How many interactions should it contain? What is the flow of those intercations? I often commend construction companies, architects or interior designers who want to visualize their project in an immersive way. Since they already have 3D plans of the project, the optimization to VR can be done relatively quickly, or at least quicker than when no 3D models are available yet. The length and thus the cost of the optimization process depends on the quality of the 3D files from which we start. We then try to guide our clients in how to best deliver them. This does not fully agree with the argument that companies are completely dependent on our expertise, as sometimes there’s already 3D expertise inside the company, escpecially in the AEC industry. But doing 3D models like CAD is very different from building a VR application in Unity (the engine to build interactive experiences like games). The models are just a 3D representation – a technical drawing if you will, making them interactive in an immersive world is much more like building a 3D game, hooking everything up together and make it all interactive.

But still, as big as the distance may be between a technical drawer and a game artist, we tend to provide clients insight into our workflow and merge it with theirs as much as possible. We then arrive at a standardized collaboration, where the setup per project does not necessarily have to be complex. We just need to make good agreements. Even when there is little or no 3D content, this can be accommodated by existing 3D objects you purchase online. The web is crawling with great 3D artwork libraries you pay 0 to 100$ for.

The VR experience offered by construction companies to their clients is often a small part of a multi-million dollar project. Virtual reality creates tremendous brand awareness. By investing in virtual reality, a company positions itself as an innovative partner and amasses a competitive advantage in a competitive market. In short, VR is a useful marketing vehicle and an ideal selling point. But it doesn’t stop there.

For the construction company’s end customer, it generates engagement, participation and involvement in the construction project even before it has started. He literally experiences his future living or working environment and can even interact with it. In this way, the client can give immediate feedback to the construction company. In turn, they can respond much faster to the client’s wishes and need fewer design iterations for their own designs, which is cost-saving. Virtual reality contributes greatly to the customer experience in this case.

However, since VR is a presales tool in this case, the construction company cannot pass on the cost to its prospect. For large projects, it is definitely worth the investment, and even for small-scale projects, a limited budget need not be pernicious. For EFF3CT – a smaller client in office housing – we created a crafted VR experience for a few thousand euros.

“By turning our designs into a virtual reality experience, I noticed that our clients have a much better sense of how our designs are put together. They understand our projects better and that’s a huge value-add, also to eventually sell them.” Gerd from EFF3CT

The solution we built for EFF3CT is based on our Interior VR package. Be sure to take a look at the visualization of the VR environment.

Our developers got to work on EFF3CT’s 3D plans and developed custom applications to meet customer needs and requirements. Moreover, custom development is what sets us apart from tools such as Revit, SketchUp, pCon, …

There are tools on the market.

Aside from virtual experiences like 360 video where you record a 360 degree video of your environment and add further 2D interactions to it, doing VR requires building a 3D model and enriching it with a virtual interface so you can interact with it in a stereoscopic manner. Building the 3D model is where you start. Say you’re in the Architectural Engineering and Construction business. Chances are quite high that you have 3D models like CAD, Revit or Sketchup already. Assuming they are optimized (the models have an optimized polygon count), they form a great staring point to be used in VR. Yet, in the same industries, the afofementioned players like Autodesk and Sketchup all have tools in the market that let you transform those same models into VR. Furthermore, there are third party apps that let you do the same. It begs the question? Should I invest in a team that builds me the experience? Well, it depends what you need. If it suffices to get a volumetric feel of your building in VR, these tools are great. Some even add some basic interactions. If you want to extend the interaction to something more elaborate, you’ll be better off investing in a custom solution.

VR is not scalable.

It’s petty neat to have you built a fully interactive 3D environment. But what happens when you want changes to that environment, or to the interactions in it? You need to go back to your provider and ask him to change the scene, which of course will cost you. Ideally you can change this yourself, but VR is too custom to go about it yourself. 

In any regular circumstance where you’ll want a VR experience like a virtual training, the VR expert will build the 3D environment and add all the needed interactions for the training. The client can then start to train its employees, but soon 2 major issues arise: other than following along the employee on a monitor screen, the trainer has no option to intervene in the virtual environment. The trainer can only tell the employee what to do and in a very awkard manner steer the employee by physically taking over the controller of the trainee. There is no way to put the trainee into another scene or skip scenes. The second issue that arises is that soon enough the trainer will want to edit some procedural steps. He will need to come back to the provider so they can do the changes for him. It’s not very scalable that way.

To service both issues, we built Abilitee, a VR configurator that allows companies to manage the training themselves, in a manner that’s much more agile for them. We implemented it with some major clients but what happened was that they stopped using it. It wasn’t agile enough. And that’s perfectly understandable. VR is fun but the learning curve to start doing it is too high and the 3D materials are just too complex to be left to clients. Not until it becomes much more scalable in that way, VR will never become truly mainstream. At this moment Abilitee, development on Abilitee is suspended, because of these issues. As such, we feel VR has not yet reached the maturity and the mass adoption to make it user-friendly enough to be used.

I have to rely on an expert.

And that brings us to the last issue. You will need to rely on an expert provider to do VR for you. Nowadays there are cheaper programs and tools that make the optimization to VR happen in a few clicks. I notice that companies are also experimenting with this, yet the quality currently cannot match custom development. Moreover, you cannot add personalized interaction to the VR environment with such a tool.

Thanks to custom development, the possibilities are endless. Customers can determine the interactions themselves. Move a wall, adjust the texture of the floor, change the color of a chair, open a door, turn the light on and off, … anything goes!

As an expert in every field from Pre-Columbean pottery to Black Hole Singularity, Pimp. is the master in augmented & virtual reality. You can call him for inspiration, expertise or just to have some fun with experimental drugs.