23Aug/17Off
Alabama Business: Five alternate applications for virtual reality from Innovation Week
Sidewalk Film Festival partnered with commercial application sellers to a TechBirmingham for a TechTuesday event Tuesday as part of Innovation Week. Panelists ranged from traditional filmmakers to a professor of social work, all taking about unexecpted uses for virtual reality.
Here are five unusual applications for virtual reality from the panel.
- Testing: Brendan Beal, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Montevallo, used to be a child abuse investigator. No one was ever happy that he knocked on their doors. And it's hard to test his students on how they'd react to that on a final exam. So he's in the process of developing virtual reality exams: His group social work class, he hopes to see how students would react in a group social work setting and how they'd react to different factors without actually hurting people in a way that's possible in an internship.
- Field Instruction: Birmingham's Gary York has made a company on virtual reality. He told the story of his father, who bought a stereo from Best Buy but couldn't figure out how to get it wired. His father called the store, they sent out a person from Geek Squad, who also couldn't figure it out, and his father returned the stereo for a refund. This was a terrible user experience for both his father and Best Buy. But someone, he said, somewhere, knows how to set up that stereo. That's where Help Lightning comes in: the company uses a simple smartphone app that allows help professionals from anywhere in the world to use forms of virtual reality to see exactly what they're doing, and how they can help them.
See the full story here: http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf/2017/08/five_alternate_applications_fo.html