Building Connection Summer 2016

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one making any sense,” Sidney says.
While VR-based white card training
might still sound a bit left-of-centre,
VR technology is developing incredibly
rapidly and the amount of international
investment taking place is a good
indicator of just how massive many key
players expect it to be.
“A couple of years ago Facebook
bought into a company for 2 billion
dollars to develop headsets for the
Oculus rift. Samsung has also invested
heavily in their Gear VR and are now
giving them away with their phones and
Apple’s next big device is also going to be
a headset.”
In keeping with this trend, Amazon has
just bought a gaming technology and
they’re now giving it away for free
(previously it would have cost about a
million dollars to get a licence to develop
something using their tech). According
to Sidney, they’re doing this on the
understanding that there are going to be
a lot of people developing content and
they want to be the primary market for
the exchange of that content.
“There’s an incredible amount of
investment going into VR technologies at
the moment and a lot of uptake because
the big players see this as a
general commodity – the same as how
you might view your TV. This isn’t just
for gamers and computer geeks, these
companies are saying VR technology is
something that everyone will be using,”
Sidney says.
“The uptake in construction is
not great at the moment but it’s a
conservative industry and people
tend to want to wait and see what the
wave provides. But this is not a wave
of technology; this is a continuing tidal
shift. There’s no point waiting to see
where it goes before you decide how
you’re going to respond to the technology
because this is the start of a transition,
a change, and there’s not an end point to
wait for.”
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“This is not a wave of
technology, this is a continuing
tidal shift.”