Knowledge@Wharton: "Virtual Reality: Real at Last?"

From Knowledge@Wharton:

A slew of new product introductions indicate virtual reality technology is coming into its own — but it’s a sector that is still waiting for a breakthrough product to win over consumers.

Following several product entries into the emerging field of virtual reality from companies like Samsung, Sony, Canon and Facebook’s Oculus Rift project, Microsoft recently launched the HoloLens, an augmented reality headset, and HoloStudio, a software development kit for the product, in hopes of jump-starting a market that could impact areas from gaming and entertainment to collaboration and business.

Microsoft’s move to make augmented reality applications a part of a ubiquitous software platform like the company’s Windows 10 operating system could prove to be a big validation of the technology. Broadly defined, virtual reality (VR) encompasses a set of technologies that places the user in a computer-generated, three-dimensional environment. Augmented reality mixes the physical with the virtual, layering computer-generated objects and information onto the real world.

“When the leading investors and companies in Silicon Valley all make bets on something as ‘the next big thing,’ it has one of two implications: They are very right, or very wrong,” says Kevin Werbach, a Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor. “The basic idea that VR and augmented reality will eventually catch on because they add richness to our interactions with computers seems sound. The key questions are when, and how broadly, adoption spreads.”

For its part, Microsoft is betting that the time for augmented reality is now. At its Windows 10 preview event in Seattle on January 21, the company demonstrated a variety of uses for HoloLens, including a virtual plumber guiding a do-it-yourself project and an augmented reality version of the open-ended world-building environment Minecraft, which came into the Microsoft fold with its September purchase of video game developer Mojang. HoloLens can create the illusion of an interactive hologram-like figure similar to the image of Princess Leia beamed out of R2D2 in the first Star Wars movie.

At the Windows 10 event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the HoloLens effort is a part of higher aspirations for Windows. “We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows,” said Nadella, who also highlighted how Microsoft and NASA were collaborating with the HoloLens technology to control Mars rovers in July....MUCH MORE