Virtual Reality in Business

16

October

2018

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Companies like Oculus, HTC, and Samsung more or less affordable and consumer friendly virtual reality (VR) headsets several years ago, however it still has not become mainstream. The issue is the price not only of the headsets, but also of the hardware needed to drive them. On the other hand, businesses have been trying to implement VR in innovative ways.

Some companies promote tourism in virtual way. Instead of travelling to an expensive location far away, customers can put on their headset to go on a VR trip instead. Companies like Cerevo take it even further, using their Taclim VR boots, users can walk on a sandy beach and feel the sandy terrain under their feet (Business.com, 2018).

Next way companies use this technology is to let their customers try their product before they buy it. For example, Lowe’s Home Improvement offers their customer to design a perfect kitchen or a bathroom and then look inside and experience it using VR. Another example is Audi, which allows customers to use their VR experience to configure and view their new can virtually.

One of the most important application of VR is training. American retail corporation Walmart partnered with VR creator Strivr to prepare its employees for Black Friday sales. Employees get to experience long queues and crowds to get ready for exceptional events. Oculus developed Virtual Speech, which helps users to practice their public speaking. They can upload their slides, receive real time feedback on the presentation delivery and even experience distractions.

Merging VR with another buzzwords, AI and big data, US company Virtualitics created a virtual platform to help data visualization in 3D. Users can use Virtualitics’ platform to view, analyze and work together in their own VR space, finding new insights into business operations and potential outliers, which need addressing (Finch, 2018).

References
Business.com, 2018. Virtual Reality Business Use Cses. [Online]
Available at: https://www.business.com/articles/virtual-reality-business-use-cases/
[Accessed 16 October 2018].
Finch, S., 2018. 5 Business Uses of Virtual Reality. [Online]
Available at: https://disruptionhub.com/business-virtual-reality-5-uses/
[Accessed 8 October 2018].

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Does Google Know Everything?

14

October

2018

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Google products are everywhere, from cloud services as Gmail and Google Drive, operating systems like Android OS or Chrome OS, Chrome browser with its 66% market share (Keizer, 2018), Google Assistant and smart devices connected to it, to hardware, for example Pixel phones or Chromebooks. Using its products, Google collected a great amount of data to get as precise profile of every individual as possible.

The most obvious way of the data collection is Google’s search engine, which keeps track of the topics users search for and which ads users click on. This is used to build a list of topics that are relevant to the individual. Google News provides extra topics user is interested in. To build a list of personal information, Google takes data from mobile phones, such as your name, email addresses, phone number, birthday, etc (DeMuro, 2018).
Another source of data is Gmail. Although in June 2018, Google promised to stop scanning content of users sent and received emails, some third-party apps still do this (Allan, 2018). Same goes for Hangouts’ messages and Calendar appointments, which all get analyzed. Google Photos, photo sharing and storage service, collects data on places tagged, items present in the picture, and even uses facial recognition to find out who is in the picture.

Google Maps, a popular web mapping and navigation service, not only tracks places users search for, but also every place visited, the amount of time spent there, or number of kilometers walked and driven each day. Google knows precisely where its users are at any given time. Even though, it is possible to “opt-out” from its location services, Google continues tracking all users. A lawsuit was filed due to this issue (Tung, 2018).

It is up to us to decide how much of our life we want to share with large corporations like Google and to find a balance between privacy on one hand and comfort and convenience on the other.

References
Allan, D., 2018. Google may not read your Gmail messages, but third-party apps do. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/google-may-not-read-your-gmail-messages-but-third-party-apps-do
[Accessed 2018 October 14].
DeMuro, J., 2018. What does Google know about you?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/what-does-google-know-about-you
[Accessed 2018 October 14].
Keizer, G., 2018. Top web browsers 2018: Internet Explorer sags below 10%. [Online]
Available at: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3199425/web-browsers/top-web-browsers-2018-internet-explorer-sags-below-10.html
[Accessed 14 October 2018].
Tung, L., 2018. Google sued for tracking you, even when ‘location history’ is off. [Online]
Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-sued-for-tracking-you-even-when-location-history-is-off/
[Accessed 14 October 2018].

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