This week in Mixed Reality (XR) news brings higher engagement opportunities for in-person activities, VR tourism and virtual reality finally hits classrooms as brands look to introduce VR to enhance traditional experiences.
Enhancing Physical Experiences With VR
What’s Happening: The National Zoological Park in Delhi is adding VR headsets and mobile apps to their zoo offerings in hopes to make visits more engaging and informative. Visitors can use a VR headset to get physically closer to animals while also seeing how they might behave in nature.
Why It Matters: Supplemental content has always been popular for adding value, but it’s traditionally fact-based and dry. With AR/VR it’s possible to bring people to places never before imaginable. How can you use XR to provide additional value to your customer base while driving higher engagement? If you have physical locations, it’s worth considering what VR and AR experiences can be introduced to drive excitement and take consumers deeper than possible in the real world.
VR Tourism Is Coming
What’s Happening: VR travel is on its way to taking would-be-travelers anywhere in the world. There are a couple of ways this is happening. The first is by helping consumers virtually visit real-world locations, while the other is allowing us to visit fantastical worlds that don’t exist in our reality. Today in Japan, airlines are developing tech to allow people to put on a VR headset and take control of a travelling robot. This lets travelers look around from a fixed point and also control where and what they see through the eyes of the distant bot.
Why It Matters: With the ability to take users anywhere we can imagine, expect to see a shift in the way people think about travel—the technology now makes it possible to experience travel without booking a plane ticket. While this won’t appeal to everyone, many people will likely jump at the opportunity to travel to faraway lands during their lunch break. Businesses would do best to consider how to leverage all the positive experiences of virtual travel, and how traveling without the jet lag will entice your consumer base.
Virtual Reality In The Classroom
What’s Happening: Lenovo’s newest headset, the ‘Lenovo VR Classroom 2,’ is the latest device to brink immersive content to the classroom. It’s a 3DOF headset with a suite of education tools to drive higher engagement among students as this tech takes them beyond classroom learning.
Why It Matters: Imagine a world where students can go anywhere or see anything without cost or logistics getting in the way. For businesses that are looking to the future workforce, this is a big deal. Instead of waiting for students and the workforce to come to you, there’s now an opportunity to reach these students through education-based experiences. With the help of ThinkReality and LanSchool Air students will have the capability to learn well beyond what can be presented in a classroom.