According to research firm Tractica,everything from medicine to academia will benefit from the consumer virtual reality push. They predict that advances in consumer virtual reality technology from big companies like Facebook-owned Oculus VR, Sony, HTC, Valve, Samsung, and Microsoft, the enterprise VR business will grow from $114 million in 2014 to over $4.5 billion by 2020.
According to Clink Wheelock, managing director at Tractica, the billions of dollars being invested into the consumer VR market has raised the profile of VR immeasurably, and technology vendors, software developers, and enterprise end-user organizations are taking a closer look at how VR could apply to a wide variety of enterprise applications. "Unlike the consumer market, virtual reality has existed in niche enterprise and industrial segments since its origins in the 1950s and 1960s," says Wheelock. "VR plays an important role in combat training for the military, for example, while advanced visualization techniques are extremely powerful tools for research purposes. Health care has also made use of the technology for quite some time."
"Consider a virtual welding simulator with teaching software that lets a remotely-located instructor develop content and then provide feedback to the trainee," Wheelock says. "Or, in the case of medical applications, a virtual house call enabling a doctor to carry out an examination without having to be located in the same country, let alone in the same room."
