Consumer-ready virtual reality (VR) technology is already on the market, with open-source apps and platforms available for developers to help build out the initial offerings by companies such as Microsoft. Proposal writers and managers can embrace this new technology and help guide its productivity applications.
If VR technology used to be a frontier, it is now more like a town still being settled, with rough-paved roads and several storefronts waiting to be inhabited. This article is a brief, personal report from that just-settled town.
Variety in the Game
The language of VR has been around since the late 1980s, when Jaron Lanier first coined the term. Fast-forward to now: VR is an immersive, computer-generated experience that mimics the environment of the physical world, allowing the viewer to have some degree of freedom.
Many people have tried Google Cardboard, a low-cost smartphone holder that allows you to sample 3-D movies and change your viewing angle—often by looking up, down, and in every direction—to focus on new details. More expensive, immersive headsets—often built to work on gaming platforms—allow you to move through a 3-D environment, either by pressing buttons, moving joysticks, or actually walking in a confined physical space. On the heels of gaming headsets such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, Microsoft’s release of a VR platform has encouraged many manufacturers to offer lower-cost hardware aimed at a wider consumer and business market—maybe even the proposal management industry.
If VR technology used to be a frontier, it is now more like a town still being settled, with rough-paved roads and several storefronts waiting to be inhabited.
Terms of the Trade
Besides the ubiquitous “VR,” there are two other essential terms:
- Augmented reality refers to technology that overlays the physical world with images or holograms (and is also being pursued by Microsoft as a much-hyped collaborative business tool and “virtual computer”).
- Mixed reality sounds like augmented reality, but it is Microsoft’s name for its VR application that allows outside developers to create software and hardware that expands the capabilities of VR.
VR isn’t necessarily about expensive headsets and controllers. It can include any experience that is highly immersive, including 2-D websites that move you through rendered simulations of 3-D environments. Building more widely accessible, interactive 3-D web versions of proposals is now possible (and it deserves a separate article). The essential ingredients for powerful web-based projects applies to full-on VR as well, including high user engagement through exploration and the ability to render complex information in visually compelling and clear ways.
Productivity Possibilities
The newest VR hardware hitting the open market is compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality. Aside from some marketing to gamers, much of the hype centers around the possible productivity applications. I’ve been spending time with these applications, and I can indeed enter a virtual house or office and pull down or create windows and screens, internet browsers, documents, spreadsheets—the full range of Microsoft productivity programs. If you ignore the limitations that I and others have encountered (for now), we can easily imagine that in the next couple of years, virtual collaboration and even primary work could be advanced by VR technology.
For me, however, an astronomy application that moves seamlessly through, around, and inside various targets hints at what could be developed for complex proposal streams. Allowing evaluators to follow connections and zoom in and out as needed, all within an intuitive space that doesn’t need its own set of directions, is a powerful application of VR. But such capability needs to be encouraged by possible users—in this case, members of organizations such as APMP.
Jeff Karon is the owner of consulting firm Jeff Karon LLC in Tampa, Florida. He can be reached at strategy@jeffkaron.com.
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