By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Knowledge workers inhabiting the power-fame metroplex which is Washington DC have a language all their own. I recently learned that in Washington there are “facts” and then there are “true facts.” In the global economy there are multiple realities. This is not presented to be cynical. Some of these realities are becoming instantiated in the tools, techniques and behaviors associated with rapid developments in the virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality [AR] ecosystems. All these realities have to be understood. Many of these realities offer the opportunity for supra-normal performance.

Human Reality Was Never a Singularity
There has never really been a simple “oneness” to human existence. What has separated our species from the lower orders and driven human evolution is the ability to operate in several realities simultaneously. Early humans and many contemporary chief financial officers and stock pickers tended to focus the majority of mental capacity on the in-your-face, dog-eat-dog existential reality presented by the natural world [i.e., is it lunch or am I lunch?]

Humans are able to think in multiple time frames. The basic executive realities include “what has happened in the past” [i.e., how did we get to this point?]; “what is happening now?”; and “what should we do next?” Being able to construct and communicate a reality depicting what should we do next [i.e., if we do X, then Y will happen kind of reasoning] is, and has always been a core executive capability.

New Kids on the Reality Block
Enter VR and AR. San Francisco based market research firm Digi-Capital forecasts that VR and AR will be $30 billion and $120 billion market places by 2020. There is something going on here. VR/AR is not just a gamer, entertainment or journalism play. These technologies will impact how work happens.

Thoughts About Adoption
We are still in the early days of this market. One boffin opined that it “feels a bit like the smartphone market before the iPhone.” Getting share-of-mind will be made easier by the growing submarket supplying cheap kits that let people turn their smartphones into bare-bones VR headsets.

In an industry defining moment, in Q4 2015 the New York Times distributed Google Cardboard to its subscribers so they can watch New York Times virtual reality stories.

All the major players plan on participating. Sony, HTC, Google, Samsung and Microsoft join Oculus, purchased by Facebook for $2 billion. Oculus’ CEO Brendan Iribe counsels those new to the industry “You have to remember, that VR is, essentially, a hack on the human sensory system.”
The question moving forward migrates from “what is real” to “which reality are we working in right now.” The general executive public – much like the early cinema patrons who fled the theatre when the 1895 movie Train Pulling into a Station was first exhibited don’t know how to react.

Museums like the Cleveland Museum of Art have embraced VR/AR to tackle the era defining top issue – customer engagement.

How will you plan to manage your virtual and augmented realities going forward?