Virtual reality will take over the world by 2020, reckons analyst haus Think virtual reality headsets are for gamers? Think again, says analyst Forrester. It reckons an estimated 52 million head-mounted VR displays will be in consumer and enterprise use in the US by the year 2020. Facebook’s Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will, the analyst reckons, break out of gaming and be used to create “a wide …
All an estate agent has to learn to do is shoot a 360 video of a tour of the property they are punting and it's already orders of magnitude more informative than some 2D photos. Stick a GearVR or some such on your barnet and it's a reasonable substitute for actually travelling to view a property.
It's actually one area where I think the tech will catch on pretty fast.
OTOH, 52m HMDs in the US by 2020? Seems like a bit of a stretch.
It's enough of a market that a few years ago a wide-angle lens camera was sold specifically for estate agents. (Though these days, wide-angle, relativity large sensor compact cameras are more common and cheaper, and many phone cameras are good enough and simplify the work flow)
it's already orders of magnitude more informative than some 2D photos ... it's a reasonable substitute for actually travelling to view a property
Oh, please. "Informative", assuming you're using it in the conventional sense and not an information-theoretical one, is subjective, so "orders of magnitude" is meaningless hyperbole. But I've seen plenty of house listings with "virtual walkthroughs" done with conventional video and panoramic photo-stitching, and the gulf between them and actually being there is tremendous - so much so that it dwarfs the difference between static photos and the "walkthroughs".
VR really wouldn't add much, unless it was an extremely extensive recording. When you visit a property in person, you have more than simply your choice of camera positions, such as the intuitive sense of scale. And when people look at a real scene, their eyes traverse it continuously and they move about, letting the brain build a model of it; that's actually quite difficult to replicate in VR.
And that's just the visual experience. Anyone who buys a house without actually standing in it, and walking around, and listening, and smelling ... well, that person's a fool.1 For the vast majority of people, a house is a major purchase that they'll have to live with intimately for years. You want to bring all your senses to bear. Preferably on multiple visits.
And that's assuming the VR recording wasn't manipulated to distort the experience of the property. Agents obviously take photographs to favor a property; if anything, VR gives them an opportunity to bias the experience even further.
1Modulo personal sensory limitations, of course.
Some places also don't seem to know what VR actually is.
I've found a few sites, including estate agents, that claim to be using Virtual Reality, that are just using 360° pictures.
For me,it must have depth, i.e. 3D/stereoscopic to be VR. A picture you can scroll around on a normal phone/tablet/PC is not VR!
1975? You're about 40 years late.
Which of course only supports your point. Marvel of technology to change our lives Real Soon Now! Everyone climb aboard! Monorail!
I saw several VR demonstrations at SIGGRAPH in 1988. Wasn't impressed then; not impressed now.
[Really, Reg? "The title is too long"? With all those storage articles you'd think you folks could afford a few more bytes in your table column.]
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There may be loads of uses for it in 2020 but it's still going to be niche.
It's going to go the same way as 3D TV. Loads of people will have it but they won't use it every day. It's just too much of a faff to get kitted up. 3D TV didn't really happen because people like to do other stuff at the same time as watching TV. No chance of that with VR as it's an all or nothing experience.
@Daleos - Exactly, if people can't be bothered putting on lightweight glasses for 3D TV, why do analysts expect them to put on heavy VR helmets that mean you can't check your phone?
My laymans guess is that the future will be large floor to ceiling pseudo holographic screens (a light field display) using something like SeeReals tech: http://www.seereal.com/en/holography/holography_technology.php
For something like viewing a property on an estate agent's website a holo display would be preferable (and much less hassle) to the full emersion/presence of a VR helmet. It would be much better for watching a football match too. I suspect movies might be the same, as the action is only happening in one spot right in front of the audience anyway. The 'presence' VR provides is cool, but I'm struggling to see an application beyond gaming (where you are the center of the action) that couldn't be done by a 'no step up' pseudo holographic TV that just acts as a large window into a 3D world.
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