Many of the most remarkable experiences people have related to me in the area of virtual reality (VR) so far have been about an experience with an HTC Vive headset. Many people are first blown away by the opportunity to swim underneath the water with some digital whales. Besides all the gaming applications, many people are waiting to invest in their first headsets because the technology just doesn’t have enticing enough or useful enough applications.
When companies with as much money as HTC and Oculus want to create a seismic shift in awareness about consumer VR, they generally have the marketing budgets to create a hype that is a representation of a symbolic and tectonic shift in awareness of a new technology that will revolutionize one aspect of our lives or another. It’s imperative to try and dig through the hype to see how the technology is evolving and focus on the obstacles and impediments as well as the achievements and accolades.
That being said, it can be difficult to know anything without hands-on experience. But announcements from leaders in the field of 3D modeling and VR teaming up is interesting because it draws you into a larger view of how these technologies are converging to create or improve different services in various disciplines and industries.
Large companies will be teaming up to bring VR to the valuable enterprise market, and that’s what the latest announcement from Dassault Systèmes is about.
Dassault Systèmes built a collaborative virtual environment platform called 3DEXPERIENCE. The idea behind the platform is to create software solutions for every organization — from marketing to sales to engineering — that allow you to create different experiences for customers and clients. Its interface is built on 3D design, analysis, simulation and intelligence software and is available onsite and on the cloud. 3DEXPERIENCE allows a company to create different social networks, plug in different Dassault Systèmes apps and share 3D models instantly within the 3DEXPERIENCE network to every level of a company. Now in this partnership with HTC Vive, the companies are teaming up to present 3DEXPERIENCE as a 3D visualization platform that is VR ready for enterprises that are betting money on VR as a technology with enterprise potential. I can see this working to connect designers, engineers and manufacturers with efficient means to share their work to incorporate feedback into a design or explain different characteristics of an assembly or component.
“VR is a truly disruptive technology in business as well as our lives, and Dassault Systèmes is leading the way in demonstrating how VR can help organizations transform their business, enhancing their products and services or creating completely new offerings,” said Cher Wang, chairwoman and CEO of HTC.
HTC and Dassault Systèmes are targeting business and governments at several upcoming global events including Dassault Systèmes’ “Age of Experience” series of events in Milan, Boston, Shanghai and London. The HTC Vive VR system will be presented in the context of offering a HTC Vive version of the 3DEXPERIENCE in design, manufacturing, marketing and scientific contexts. The two companies will also be at the World Cities Summit from July 10 to 14 in Singapore, demonstrating a version of 3DEXPERIENCE called 3DEXPERIENCity, which is a platform designed specifically for governments and their business partners to model and simulate projects and services in 3D and now VR.
It will be hard to tell how effective this combined strategy will be for some time, but getting VR into the enterprise market doesn’t sound easy.