Virtual Reality takes over real life
Remember the movie Matrix in 1999. Keanu Reeve was wiring himself to a pod that sends his mind to another virtual world. Knowledge and martial art could be downloaded to his brain and he saved the world in a Hollywood way. This is now happening to our current generation. The new generation of games will make gamers put on a pair of goggles for hours. You will see your children screaming and jumping around the house wearing these goggles and you have no clue what they have been eating. The tiny screen could give the gamers the experience of sky diving or wrestling with a zombie in their own living room. This actually sounds worse than everyone looking at their mobile phones at the dining table on Christmas. Virtual Reality (“VR”) could make the people in your house further away from the real world. There is a more real version of VR. Augmented Reality in simple terms is to project a virtual world in a real world. So through the screen, one will see Spiderman hanging on his ceiling and Captain America sitting at his desk. There are some day to day commercial use in AR. For example, one goes into a Porsche showroom and if you have the right App, you could point your phone at the latest white 911 and change the color to red and change the exhaust pipe, leather color inside, etc. Or you can point your phone at your living room, drag and drop different Ikea furnitures to get a feel of what the living room would look like with a new sofa and dining table.
The giant multi-national companies of course want to make a living with this new technology. Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox obviously would take this chance to secure their fans base with launching new VR games. It would be amazing to play Winning Eleven and tackle Messe in virtual reality. Samsung has launched a pair of goggles for you to attach your latest Samsung handset to experience VR anytime anywhere. HTC launched an almost NASA laboratory like gadget called Vive that minimizes the lag between your hand turning and the display on the goggles. Apparently, it should make the users less dizzy. Facebook bought Oculus Rift for USD 2 billion in 2014 and the headset was launched at EUR 700 a piece in March 2016. Oculus already can take you to experience Games of Thornes with virtually real sword and sheild. The combination of Facebook and virtual reality could be explosive. Friends will have virtual gathering or could attend a distant birthday party without the travelling.
Big money is being poured into VR. According to a report from Digi Capital, in 2015, USD 700 million was invested into Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. In 2016, USD 800 million investment went into Magic Leap, the hottest startup in the VR world and it is based in Florida. Apparently, it will really turn you into an Iron Man, maybe not the flying part but the bit when you could throw a globe in the middle of your study room and it expands to the galaxy. If Magic Leap could turn an apartment in Eelphant and Castle to a townhouse in Chelsea, the USD 800 million is very well spent. AR and VR revenue is forecast to hit USD 120 billion annually globally by 2020.
VR uses a lot of computation power. This makes the future of cloud computing even brighter. Amazon and Google have mentioned their VR initiative here or there. But these two giants do not need to necessarily compete with their own gadgets. Google has launched a smartphone or two but it is happy to see Apply, Samsung and Huawei fighting for market shares as long as there more and more smartphones sold on the planet. More smartphones mean more searches and more revenue for Google who still dominate the search engine world. Amazon similar enjoys more online shoppers who use smartphones to shop while they are waiting for their transport.
