As part of our push to do more international research, I hopped over to Europe to show some customers VR and gather their impressions and thoughts on use cases. This time it was at OBUG, the Oracle Benelux User Group, which was held in Arnhem, a refreshing city along the Rhine.
Given that VR is one of the big technologies of 2016, and is posed to play a major role in the future of user experience, we want to know how our users would like to use VR to help them in their jobs. But first we just need to know what they think about VR after actually using it.
The week prior, Tawny and I showed some VR demos to customers and fellow Oracle employees at Collaborate in Las Vegas, taking them to the arctic to see whales and other denizens of the deep (link) and for the few with some extra time, defusing some bombs in the collaborative game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” (game; Raymond’s blog post from GDC).
The reaction to the underwater scenes are now predictable: pretty much everyone loves it, just some more than others. There’s a sense of wonder, of amazement that the technology has progressed to this point, and that it’s all done with a smartphone. Several people have reached out to try to touch the sea creatures that are swimming by their view, only to realize they’ve been tricked.
Our European customers are no different than the ones we met at Collaborate, with similar ideas of how it could be used in their businesses.
It’s certainly a new technology, and we’ll continue to seek out use cases, while thinking up our own. In the meantime, VR is lots of fun.