Will Virtual Reality Really Change Your Life?

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emergent technology that is attracting 3-times the investment dollars than it did just last year, according to a report by the New York Times. According the the Times, total investment dollars into VR technology were $408 million, up from only $145 million in the first nine months of 2014. Some speculate that VR technology will transform the world like smartphones of the past. 

Here are at least 4 ways VR will change our world:

1. Real estate: Imagine being sent a link to a VR tour of your dream home that you can actually walk-through. Forget having to drive hours on end to see houses; you can simply explore them virtually. This could save a lot of money on real estate fees, while giving realtors a chance to have multiple walkthroughs of a house over a 24-hour period. And the selling home owners won't even have to leave the house. With such ease of experiencing real estate, would we see a major surge in the real estate market itself? 

2. Collaboration: Let's say you're an architect in Toronto and you need to collaborate on a building with a team in Paris--easy: with VR, an entire team could be working on the same project in real time. We already have a kind of crude virtual meeting technology, but because it's screen to screen, it can seem flat and 2-dimensional. With VR, you could feel like you're in the same room, which will make business deals from across long distances seamless with perhaps even higher levels of trust. 

3. Training: Medical practitioners could recreate in fine detail various operating rooms and scenarios open to students and faculty alike to engage from numerous locations at once. Imagine how that will also translate to online learning, in which people can hook up from all over the world in a virtual lecture hall, have dialogue, etc. 

4. Relationships: As with business, people seeking relationships can meet one another virtually before agreeing to a date in the physical world. 

There are indeed innumerable uses for VR technology; and as the technology grows exponentially, many will experience some kind of virtual world in a more visceral way. 

The questions remain: how such technology will alter our minds, what we expect from experience in general, how we perceive the real world? Will the VR world be so much more exciting that we will cease improving upon and building the physical, or real, world? Will VR technology be modern-day opium in which people trip out for months on end exploring virtual worlds while languishing in this one? What kind of people will we have become to spend much of our time in such a world? 

We always have to ask ourselves, when there is a nascent technology, how it will impact our lives, and whether or not whatever technology is on the table is indeed a wise thing. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious, but it's a serious question; and the answers--whether about VR or AI or what have you--are not coming fast enough...