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Four P’s Remastered

The metaverse is years away. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to figure out your brand’s place in it. To make it manageable follow these four P’s of metaverse marketing.

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This article was originally published to Medium

The metaverse is years away. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to figure out your brand’s place in it. To make it manageable follow these four P’s of metaverse marketing: Product, People, Performance and Protection.

DALLE-2: Watching the pieces come together.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to toss out the other marketing P’s you’ve learned over the years. In fact, you definitely need those too. If you don’t know what those are there are way better places to learn about them than here.

Miss parts one and two? Today is the last time you’ll be able to say that.

Six Years

The metaverse is six years from being truly mainstream. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Six years goes fast when it comes to emerging technology.

If you’re wondering where all this certainty about the future is coming from the answer is Gartner. The Gartner Hype Cycle is useful for tracking the tools that are going to make the metaverse possible. In this case we’re interested in foundational technology for the metaverse: web3, NFTs, decentralized identity & generative design AI. These pieces of tech are all on the 2–5 year track in the Hype Cycle. The metaverse itself is “more than 10 years out” by their reasoning. But taken together it is my opinion that a “mature metaverse” is six years out. A mature metaverse is one with ad products to buy, systems to integrate with and most of all a strong creator economy in place. The metaverse in 10-plus years will be well into its mature phase and the opportunity for innovation will be on the downswing.

So with 6 years on the clock, how do you start getting your business ready for the metaverse?

DALLE-2: Transforming real into digital

Product

There are myriad ways to get your product into the metaverse. But ultimately it comes down to two ways of looking at it:

Direct Representation and Abstract Representation of the product.

Direct Representation

If you make a real world product you’ve probably figured this out. Real world products — especially clothes, shoes and accessories — are already in the metaverse. It’s not always cool, it doesn’t always make sense, but most real products exist digitally anyway. Cars, toasters, lamps, bookcases; all of these are manufactured using tools that unfurl the complicated matter of matter and render them in reality. So moving them to a digital world means getting the format right and choosing a platform partner.

But before these products throw off their two-dimensional existence for the exciting new three-dimensional ones consider the following:

What purpose does this product serve in a digital world?

My friend Martine Lavoie likes to use a water bottle as example for this problem, and it’s a great one. In the real world a water bottle holds liquid to be consumed by its owner. It keeps you hydrated. But in the digital world we don’t need water. So a direct representation of a water bottle won’t be that interesting. Without a purpose it becomes a cosmetic accessory. Not all bad. A large portion of what made Fortnite successful was understanding the value of cosmetic items in virtual worlds.

In order for this to work we have to give the water bottle a purpose in a digital world. Our water bottle needs to in some way alter the way we experience a digital world.

In the world of Fortnite “being hydrated” might simply mean having a full health for your in-game avatar. So our water bottle could have some interaction with restoring your avatar’s health. A character animation that shows our avatar chugging from the bottle as their health rises could be one form of Direct Representation. Another way could be arranging a sponsorship or creating a mod where health improving items on the map resemble our humble water bottle.

But what if you don’t have a real-world product to begin with. If you’re a bank, insurance company, law firm or consultancy your services have no physical analog in a digital world. Instead you need to think about how your product or service exists through Abstract Representation.

Abstract Representation

Abstract Representation tells people something about the product or service by changing their digital identity or the world in which it exists. It is what you sell as an idea rather than a literal representation of the prduct.

Good news: your ad agency already knows how to think this way. The best agencies in the world have built their whole business on stripping down a product to its base idea and then showing how that idea changes the customer’s life for the better.

Let’s say we’re a big bank known for having locations just about everywhere people go™. The products we offer like loans; savings & chequing accounts; or overdraft protection have no analong outside the real world. Sure, you can use them to buy digital currency that is used in metaverse platforms. But that doesn’t tell us a thing about your bank. It doesn’t say that our services are available everywhere people go™. Instead we need to figure how the promise of being our customer extends into unreal worlds:

How does being our customer add value to the way they experience a digital world?

The answer to this comes from our differentiator: everywhere people go™. Differentiators make brands recognizable in a new context. In this case that new context is 3D worlds.

One way we could accomplish this is to simply extend the interfaces of our services to these new worlds. That would be “everywhere people go™” through Direct Representation.

But another way might be having agents in popular virtual worlds. Today these agents would be creators. In a few years virtual people might be a viable way to do this as well. Agents are exclusively available to customers and teach you the ins-and-outs of the virtual world they’re in.

However, understanding your product in this way means you need to understand your customers first. Without knowing them well it’s hard (impossible?) to figure out if having virtual water bottles on their avatar or being everywhere people go™ is something they care about at all.

DALLE-2: The social apparatus evolves.

People

No metaverse will be successful without people. Lots of people. If you’ve ever played an massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that hasn’t taken off yet you know how hollow digital worlds can feel.

So lets assume that all the metaverse platforms understand this and succeed in getting us together in virtual worlds. Is it the same as when we all joined Twitter in 2006? There are similarities, but old-guard social networks like Twitter had a different purpose in that time. They were almost exclusively about connecting people. In 2022 it’s expected that platforms connect people. So now platforms promise more than connections. Metaverse platforms promise the most. They promise to connect us in natural ways, they promise to let us own our identities and evolve them and most importantly they promise to let us create new things together in digital worlds.

It is this intersection of individuality and togetherness that we need to understand in order to make the metaverse useful to our customers (and therefore to our businesses).

Individuality is a promise of metaverse experiences. This is a direct rip from the world of gaming. Building a “character” to play a game is a concept that goes all the way back to tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. “Character creation” is a common feature of modern games of all types. Some are so intricate they’re almost as interesting as the game itself.

This focus on hyper-individuality is what makes metaverse experiences appealing to creators. In their current world distinctiveness is elusive. It’s elusive because the algorithms that decide what is popular shape how we behave as we seek that popularity. The result is homogeny, and the cycle starts over.

Togetherness is on the other side of the equation. Since a metaverse with no one else in it is purgatory we need to create a lot for people to do.

What people do together in the metaverse matters a lot. The metaverse is real time fun. It’s not leaving a quip for others to laugh at on a wall, or a recorded video showing how to make a perfect Caesar.

While metaverse experiences look a lot like games they aren’t strictly games. Games have competitive objectives. Most metaverse platforms have creative objectives. Minecraft and Roblox have gaming elements in them: bad guys to fight, power ups to collect, but they’re not successful because of this, they’re successful because of what they let you create in them.

Like our Product exercise we can get to the heart of the matter by answering a couple of questions:

How will they express themselves? & What will they do when they’re together?

Luckily we’ve proven to be pretty good at finding ways to express ourselves. Profile pictures, a simple image to show people who you are, carry a tremendous amount of information with them. This isn’t a feature of the platforms, it’s a hack. A sanctioned hack, but a hack nonetheless.

As for what they’ll do together? Well that really depends a lot on the platform, certainly. But people are ingenious. Look no further than the world of memes. Memes are one of the largest (the largest?) collective art project people have ever undertaken. Memes show us that when people get together they can make something clever, entertaining and meaningful. But most importantly memes are a highly efficient way of communicating. They work on any screen and creating them requires just a web browser and they scale to the size of any community.

In the metaverse we should be watching for the equivalent creations that:

  1. Don’t rely exclusively on language to convey information
  2. Can be produced and consumed by any participant
  3. It improves the value of an experience for everyone

Strong hints you’ve found the creative activity people can get behind look like this: It can be understood without much analysis (more than language); anyone can join in and make it (produced by any participant); and it’s entertaining for people to be part of (improves the experience).

Fornite dances fit this model. When you dance in Fortnite you’re communicating without language (1). Today it’s possible to make your own dances, although it’s a little cumbersome (2). And… Well, dances were a real phenomenon for a while (3).

Of course, all of this is for nothing if we don’t know how well it’s working. Certainly we can see people dancing. But are they having fun? This is where Performance comes in.

DALLE-2: How are we doing?

Performance

Modern digital systems are remarkably quantifiable. Every action we take online can be measured. What’s more is every time we use these measurements to make a decision about what to do next we find even more data to collect. This never ending loop of measurement and new measures is the magic that lets us build on ideas so fast today. We are always only a click or two away from spotting the next big trend.

But the metaverse is a little different. In the metaverse people are acting in real time. Anything “real time” requires heavy duty computing. Sorting, filtering, formatting, aggregation — all of these techniques in data science have to happen in the moment when it’s handled in real time. This is 180º to the asynchronous web where there’s plenty of time to get data ready before it’s displayed as information.

That means the things we can measure in the metaverse are going to be everything we measure today, plus. Data from the asynchronous web will be valuable for setting preferences, determining what worlds we might be interested in exploring or what advertising exists in our view in a virtual world.

The “plus” is what real time opens up. The plus might be adding how we say something to what is being said. It can track what we’re looking at, for how long and where our attention is taken next.

These are all new opportunities to change what we communicate.

If you know that your latest digital twin doodad is more interesting if people see someone else with one first it makes signing on a star creator a lot less risky.

Actionable data in real time leads us to a single question to ask about how our measurement strategy needs to change:

What will you do when you can track behaviour in the moment?

After all we don’t collect data to put it on a shelf and admire it. Our job is to make decisions based on the data. And in a real time world that means making decisions before the data is in. Developers are intimately familiar with this kind of prediction. They make them all the time and they call them conditionals or “if-thens.”

First imagine what might happen (if) and determine the action taken in that circumstance (then).

Thinking this way isn’t new. It’s called “scenario planning” and you can find it in places as broad reaching as the endeavours of a military force or as specific the conditions of your auto-insurance policy. What is important is to understand what you can know, and that’s evolving quickly. The previous Oculus VR headset — Oculus Quest 2 — had four external black and white cameras. The new Oculus Pro has ten sensors.

So, find out what you can know, then think about what you’d do with the outcomes of that knowledge. This is likely a new kind of reporting you’ll need to figure out. This new type of reporting anticipates behaviour instead of exclusively analyzing it. So our understanding of how things are going shifts from hitting numbers (monthly active users, clicks, time spent) to how accurately we figure out what changes behaviour in a way that benefits customers and our brand.

The computational requirements of collecting and processing data like this are enormous. So like all of our planning for the metaverse, we have time to get it right. And that’s good because this capability is a scary one. Big platforms don’t have a great track record in how they’ve used data and it’s harmed people in the real world.

Which brings us to the last P: Protection.

DALLE-2: Changing the locks on the same old criminals

Protection

The process of ensuring our experiences in the metaverse are inclusive, safe and rewarding relies on our understanding of the other three Ps. We need accessible products and services (product) that our customers want to experience (people) and a way to figure out how to improve that experience in the future (performance).

Protection fits in the mix in a few ways. One of them is simply data security. Keeping people’s data is a big responsibility. Even more so when that data is recording what they say and look at. This is a promise of web3: data you own and can take with you easily. The latter part isn’t there yet, but the former is well developed. NFTs are one example, and also a technology that defines the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on the Hype Cycle.

But the metaverse is a creator’s space. And that means that there will be more value in these worlds as people spend time in them. Where there’s value increased by human interest there’s the potential for fraud, harassment and exploitation.

Fraud is rampant in the nascent web3 world. As this is being written FTX has crumbled and erased a few billion dollars from people’s pockets. There are plenty of crypto heists to link to as well. These have been caused by both technical flaws and human ones. It’s reasonable to think the technical will get sorted out in time. The kind of fraud we (as marketers) should think about is the latter kind. Setting up clear policies around ownership has to be coupled with technical means of enforcing those policies.

Harassment has been a severe issue online since well before the social web. Each iteration of our online existence makes harassment all the more potent. The metaverse is no exception. But, with real-time measurment comes the possibility to provide real-time enforcement of anti-harassment policies. There are rudimentary systems like this in online games today. Meta has committed to offering similar tools in their platform. It is up to us to understand these tools and to work with platform providers to improve them.

Exploitation is not unique to the metaverse, but the metaverse might be a more fertile place for exploitation to flourish. It can flourish because the nature of a metaverse experience is one where you (the user) add value to the world by being in it. Mostly this is from what we create there. This is why the metaverse is a creator’s space. To protect these creations a balance needs to be struck between creators and the platform as to how each benefits from the activities of the other.

Remastered

So. Here comes the metaverse, just six short years away. Like all technology it creates fabulous new opportunities along with scary levels of change and the risk of unforseen consequences.

But, if we spend this time planning for the metaverse we can be ready to operate there as it becomes more and more mainstream.

And it’s not all that scary. A lot of what we’ll do is familiar to us: working closely with the creator community, finding new ideas buried in the data, good old fashioned customer research and content strategy. All of it with new twists: a focus on what creators make instead of who they are; encouraging customers to do things together; knowing those customers more intimately and figuring out how to best make use of what they’ve created for us.

The metaverse is a big topic I couldn’t hope to explore in three articles. And as I was writing this the bottom appeared to be falling out of it.

Personally, I think this tech is too intriguing an idea to die just because an early mover overpromised. Every time we’re given the chance to connect with each other in some fantastic new way — chat rooms, blogs, instant messaging, social websites, social apps — there is an explosion of creativity. The metaverse is proving to be no different so far. The technical hangups always end up solved (6 years! Say it with me!) and the cultural impact is huge. As marketers we have to be close to culture. Culture is where attention is and our jobs are to capture attention.

Thanks for reading.

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How businesses can protect themselves from the rising threat of deepfakes

Dive into the world of deepfakes and explore the risks, strategies and insights to fortify your organization’s defences

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In Billy Joel’s latest video for the just-released song Turn the Lights Back On, it features him in several deepfakes, singing the tune as himself, but decades younger. The technology has advanced to the extent that it’s difficult to distinguish between that of a fake 30-year-old Joel, and the real 75-year-old today.

This is where tech is being used for good. But when it’s used with bad intent, it can spell disaster. In mid-February, a report showed a clerk at a Hong Kong multinational who was hoodwinked by a deepfake impersonating senior executives in a video, resulting in a $35 million theft.

Deepfake technology, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), is capable of creating highly realistic fake videos, images, or audio recordings. In just a few years, these digital manipulations have become so sophisticated that they can convincingly depict people saying or doing things that they never actually did. In little time, the tech will become readily available to the layperson, who’ll require few programming skills.

Legislators are taking note

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on those who impersonate others using deepfakes — the greatest concern being how it can be used to fool consumers. The Feb. 16 ban further noted that an increasing number of complaints have been filed from “impersonation-based fraud.”

A Financial Post article outlined that Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, says she feels “a sense of urgency” to act on artificial intelligence as the technology improves. “Malicious actors have found ways to synthetically mimic executive’s voices down to their exact tone and accent, duping employees into thinking their boss is asking them to transfer funds to a perpetrator’s account,” the report said. Ontario’s Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework, for which she consults, aims to set guides on the public sector use of AI.

In a recent Microsoft blog, the company stated their plan is to work with the tech industry and government to foster a safer digital ecosystem and tackle the challenges posed by AI abuse collectively. The company also said it’s already taking preventative steps, such as “ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system” as well as using watermarks and metadata.

That prevention will also include enhancing public understanding of the risks associated with deepfakes and how to distinguish between legitimate and manipulated content.

Cybercriminals are also using deepfakes to apply for remote jobs. The scam starts by posting fake job listings to collect information from the candidates, then uses deepfake video technology during remote interviews to steal data or unleash ransomware. More than 16,000 people reported that they were victims of this scam to the FBI in 2020. In the US, this kind of fraud has resulted in a loss of more than $3 billion USD. Where possible, they recommend job interviews should be in person to avoid these threats.

Catching fakes in the workplace

There are detector programs, but they’re not flawless. 

When engineers at the Canadian company Dessa first tested a deepfake detector that was built using Google’s synthetic videos, they found it failed more than 40% of the time. The Seattle Times noted that the problem in question was eventually fixed, and it comes down to the fact that “a detector is only as good as the data used to train it.” But, because the tech is advancing so rapidly, detection will require constant reinvention.

There are other detection services, often tracing blood flow in the face, or errant eye movements, but these might lose steam once the hackers figure out what sends up red flags.

“As deepfake technology becomes more widespread and accessible, it will become increasingly difficult to trust the authenticity of digital content,” noted Javed Khan, owner of Ontario-based marketing firm EMpression. He said a focus of the business is to monitor upcoming trends in tech and share the ideas in a simple way to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

To preempt deepfake problems in the workplace, he recommended regular training sessions for employees. A good starting point, he said, would be to test them on MIT’s eight ways the layperson can try to discern a deepfake on their own, ranging from unusual blinking, smooth skin, and lighting.

Businesses should proactively communicate through newsletters, social media posts, industry forums, and workshops, about the risks associated with deepfake manipulation, he told DX Journal, to “stay updated on emerging threats and best practices.”

To keep ahead of any possible attacks, he said companies should establish protocols for “responding swiftly” to potential deepfake attacks, including issuing public statements or corrective actions.

How can a deepfake attack impact business?

The potential to malign a company’s reputation with a single deepfake should not be underestimated.

“Deepfakes could be racist. It could be sexist. It doesn’t matter — by the time it gets known that it’s fake, the damage could be already done. And this is the problem,” said Alan Smithson, co-founder of Mississauga-based MetaVRse and investor at Your Director AI.

“Building a brand is hard, and then it can be destroyed in a second,” Smithson told DX Journal. “The technology is getting so good, so cheap, so fast, that the power of this is in everybody’s hands now.”

One of the possible solutions is for businesses to have a code word when communicating over video as a way to determine who’s real and who’s not. But Smithson cautioned that the word shouldn’t be shared around cell phones or computers because “we don’t know what devices are listening to us.”

He said governments and companies will need to employ blockchain or watermarks to identify fraudulent messages. “Otherwise, this is gonna get crazy,” he added, noting that Sora — the new AI text to video program — is “mind-blowingly good” and in another two years could be “indistinguishable from anything we create as humans.”

“Maybe the governments will step in and punish them harshly enough that it will just be so unreasonable to use these technologies for bad,” he continued. And yet, he lamented that many foreign actors in enemy countries would not be deterred by one country’s law. It’s one downside he said will always be a sticking point.

It would appear that for now, two defence mechanisms are the saving grace to the growing threat posed by deepfakes: legal and regulatory responses, and continuous vigilance and adaptation to mitigate risks. The question remains, however, whether safety will keep up with the speed of innovation.

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Small banks emerge as the top source for small business financing

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Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed's Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing options.
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When it comes to borrowing money, small businesses are most likely to apply at large banks. But they often find success with their counterparts in the finance world: small banks.

Small banks—or those with less than $10 billion in total assets—comprise most of the banks in the U.S., much like small businesses account for nearly all U.S. businesses. More than 80% of small businesses that applied for financing at small banks were at least partially approved in 2022, according to data from the Fed’s most recent survey of small business employers. However, only 30% of small businesses applied at small banks when they sought financing.

About 2 in 5 small business employers applied for some traditional financing in 2022. Most needed the money to meet operating expenses, while a little over half sought cash to expand their operations.

Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed’s Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing sources, taking a closer look at their differences. Approval rates are based on applications for loans, credit, and cash advances at the various institution types. The Fed report was released in March 2023 based on a 2022 survey of nearly 8,000 small businesses with employees.


A bar chart shows the share of small business applicants at least partially approved for loan requests, separated by the type of source applied to.

Findbusinesses4sale

Small banks surpass online lenders, finance companies in approval rates for small business applicants

Also known as community banks, small banks are well-equipped to lend to small businesses because of their intimate knowledge of local economies. Small businesses are often young, with short histories, small operations, little collateral, and unproven financial success. These factors can make it difficult for founders to qualify for credit and loans—they’re simply a riskier investment for a funder to take on.

Small banks’ decision-makers live within the same areas where they grant loans, and they have insight into how certain businesses could fare within their neighborhoods. That makes it easier for them to analyze the risk of lending to small businesses and, in turn, decide whether to approve their applications. At least 3 in 5 (61%) applicants considered to be a medium or high credit risk were approved for financing at small banks; at large banks, not even half (45%) of these riskier applicants were approved.

By operating across smaller locales, community bank operators also have the opportunity to forge stronger relationships with business founders. The Fed survey shows that about 2 in 3 small businesses that applied for financing with these banks did so because of an existing relationship. Many of these relationships were forged in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, when community banks came through for small businesses with relief funds, including more intensive support in understanding and completing complex applications.

Small firms applying to other sources, such as online lenders and finance companies, are most often motivated by making quick decisions and perceiving that they have a higher chance of being approved. That was the case five years ago, but approval rates for both sources lagged behind small banks in 2022. Indeed, approval rates at both have fallen significantly since 2019, while approvals at small banks have grown.

Both online lenders and finance companies still approve slightly higher shares of applicants with medium to high credit risks compared to small banks, but only by a few percentage points. At the same time, many more borrowers reported dissatisfaction and challenges working with these lenders, including high interest rates and unfavorable repayment terms.

On the other hand, the vast majority of borrowers from small banks were happy with their experience—much more than those who borrowed from any other type of lender.

Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Ania Antecka.

This story originally appeared on Findbusinesses4sale and was produced and
distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.

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The new reality of how VR can change how we work

It’s not just for gaming — from saving lives to training remote staff, here’s how virtual reality is changing the game for businesses

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Until a few weeks ago, you might have thought that “virtual reality” and its cousin “augmented reality” were fads that had come and gone. At the peak of the last frenzy around the technology, the company formerly known as Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, as a sign of how determined founder Mark Zuckerberg was to create a VR “metaverse,” complete with cartoon avatars (who for some reason had no legs — they’ve got legs now, but there are some restrictions on how they work).

Meta has since spent more than $36 billion on metaverse research and development, but so far has relatively little to show for it. Meta has sold about 20 million of its Quest VR headsets so far, but according to some reports, not many people are spending a lot of time in the metaverse. And a lack of legs for your avatar probably isn’t the main reason. No doubt many were wondering: What are we supposed to be doing in here?

The evolution of virtual reality

Things changed fairly dramatically in June, however, when Apple demoed its Vision Pro headset, and then in early February when they were finally available for sale. At $3,499 US, the device is definitely not for the average consumer, but using it has changed the way some think about virtual reality, or the “metaverse,” or whatever we choose to call it.

Some of the enhancements that Apple has come up with for the VR headset experience have convinced Vision Pro true believers that we are either at or close to the same kind of inflection point that we saw after the release of the original iPhone in 2007.Others, however, aren’t so sure we are there yet.

The metaverse sounds like a place where you bump into giant dinosaur avatars or play virtual tennis, but ‘spatial computing’ puts the focus on using a VR headset to enhance what users already do on their computers. Some users generate multiple virtual screens that hang in the air in front of them, allowing them to walk around their homes or offices and always have their virtual desktop in front of them.

VR fans are excited about the prospect of watching a movie on what looks like a 100-foot-wide TV screen hanging in the air in front of them, or playing a video game. But what about work-related uses of a headset like the Vision Pro? 

Innovating health care with VR technology

One of the most obvious applications is in medicine, where doctors are already using remote viewing software to perform checkups or even operations. At Cambridge University, game designers and cancer researchers have teamed up to make it easier to see cancer cells and distinguish between different kinds.

Heads-up displays and other similar kinds of technology are already in use in aerospace engineering and other fields, because they allow workers to see a wiring diagram or schematic while working to repair it. VR headsets could make such tasks even easier, by making those diagrams or schematics even larger, and superimposing them on the real thing. The same kind of process could work for digital scans of a patient during an operation.

Using virtual reality, patients and doctors could also do remote consultations more easily, allowing patients to describe visually what is happening with them, and giving health professionals the ability to offer tips and direct recommendations in a visual way. 

This would not only help with providing care to people who live in remote areas, but could also help when there is a language barrier between doctor and patient. 

Impacting industry worldwide

One technology consulting firm writes that using a Vision Pro or other VR headset to streamline assembly and quality control in maintenance tasks. Overlaying diagrams, 3D models, and other digital information onto an object in real time could enable “more efficient and error-free assembly processes,” by providing visual cues, step-by-step guidance, and real-time feedback. 

In addition to these kinds of uses, virtual reality could also be used for remote onboarding for new staff in a variety of different roles, by allowing them to move around and practice training tasks in a virtual environment.

Some technology watchers believe that the retail industry could be transformed by virtual reality as well. Millions of consumers have become used to buying online, but some categories such as clothing and furniture have lagged, in part because it is difficult to tell what a piece of clothing might look like once you are wearing it, or what that chair will look like in your home. But VR promises the kind of immersive experience where that becomes possible.

While many consumers may see this technology only as an avenue for gaming and entertainment, it’s already being leveraged by businesses in manufacturing, health care and workforce development. Even in 2020, 91 per cent of businesses surveyed by TechRepublic either used or planned to adopt VR or AR technology — and as these technological advances continue, adoption is likely to keep ramping up.

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