Wall Street Journal | By: Betsy Morris June 5, 2017 8:00 a.m. ET:
While consumer sales remain low, industries from construction to medicine are using the technology to train for risky jobs.
Gary Steinberg, Stanford University’s head of neurosurgery, has been operating on brains for more than three decades. Only in the past year has he been able to do something that he says gives him a significant advantage: preview the surgery and practice it.
Donning a virtual-reality headset, the 64-year-old works through thickets of digital blood vessels in a precise computer simulation of a patient’s gray matter before he cuts into the real thing.
“I can figure out how best to approach a tumor and practice it so that when I get into the operation, it’s as if I’ve been there before,” Dr. Steinberg said. “It makes surgeries safer. Outcomes are better.”
Virtual Reality, or VR, has been slow to catch on with consumers, despite the high-profile launches last year of headsets from Facebook Inc.’s Oculus unit and Taiwan’s HTC Corp.
But businesses are taking to it for training in industries from construction to medicine to sports. Executives say customized software that works like 360-degree videogames can help teach employees more effectively, less expensively, and often more safely than traditional methods.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., for example, last week said it will expand VR training to all of its 200 employee training centers this year, after testing it in 31 centers. It plans to make the technology an integral part of training for 140,000 employees annually, said Tom Ward, a Wal-Mart vice president.
And while they are pricey for many consumers, VR headsets have become affordable for most businesses: the upmarket HTC Vive VR system sells for about $800.
Research firm International Data Corp. estimates total shipments of headsets for VR and augmented reality—a related technology that superimposes digital content onto a user’s view of the real world—will grow at a compounded annual rate of 58% over the next five years. Business demand will be the main driver, with shipments of headsets for commercial growing 80% a year, versus 50% for headsets for consumers, says IDC.
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