3D presentation and immersive nature of virtual reality has already taken interaction of people to next level. 3D video calling is catching up to skype, facetime and WhatsApp calling and may even surpass their popularity. It’s because VR calling gives the feeling of teleporting to your friends, family or colleagues.
The rising question is to address how telepresence is different from presence and why it’s such a big deal. While presence is the experience that we have normally by interacting with environment, telepresence is when you mentally project a fictitious environment by using a medium. Essentially, it is a feeling of being somewhere – wherever or whatever it might be.
Virtual reality is the only technology that uses sensory stimulation to immerses you into a fictitious reality. At present, there’s no other medium that can induce telepresence in such an advanced way. Even the best ones can only do so much and put people behind a 2D window. However, VR works in such a way that transports people to same environment as of the people they are interacting with.
“I can see this being used for architecture cases or event planning. VR-based training is, of course, another huge use case that lowers the cost of getting teams deeply familiar with the skills they’ll need in prime-time situations? It could also be used for any consumer-facing product team, allowing them to capture customer feedback in an immersive environment where product teams can see, feel and observe their users’ workflow. It builds empathy.”
~ Beverly Vessella, product manager at Seattle, Wash.-based Pixvana
Even though currently VR can effectively stimulate two of human senses, i.e. hearing and sight, consistent developments are being made to stimulate other senses, for instance taste, smell and touch. The sense of teleportation is bound to get triggered and amplify as more human senses will stimulate through virtual reality.