With the vast majority of the world's biggest financial firms' employees working at home, more companies are experimenting with creative solutions to challenges arising from remote work.
Virtual reality (VR), once the preserve of gamers, is quickly becoming a potent, practical and powerful tool for various businesses, particularly the financial sector, as a means to enrich the working-from-home experience, whether for lonely traders, employees, or isolated executives.
Recreating the feeling of human interaction is what has provided impetus for the VR push, especially with the rise of "Zoom fatigue" as executives increasingly report they are combating fatigue brought on by a daily barrage of video conferences, meetings and messaging via tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which have replaced face-to-face interaction.
The hope for many is that virtual reality spaces will resuscitate team spirit, especially when bringing in new employees.
A study in June by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a London-based multinational professional services network of firms, found participants in a virtual reality workshop were three times more confident about what they had learned than those learning via traditional classrooms or e-learning courses. The study also noted that the cost to train 13,000 executives in a classroom at the firm is eight times more expensive than a virtual reality course for the same number of people.
These findings have encouraged PwC, and other companies like American Express, to dabble with VRtuoso, a virtual reality presentation platform, that utilizes headsets made by Pico Interactive for training and boosting sales.
Similarly, Swiss bank UBS has experimented with issuing its London-based traders with Microsoft HoloLens smart glasses, which it says allows staff to recreate the trading floor experience at home. While on its part, Walmart has been testing virtual reality training sessions utilizing the standalone Oculus Rift VR headset since 2017, and have found an increase in testing scores by around 5 to 10 percent.
So far, most of VR's real-world business applications are in medicine and retail, including training department stores salespeople how to deal with difficult customers.
David Ripert, chapter president of the UK branch of the global VR/AR Association noted that growth in demand for VR was a "silver lining" of the pandemic, as people used the technology to recreate cancelled physical events and conferences.
"Using VR for these networking events is really cool because you get that sense of belonging and connection that you don't get necessarily through flat 2D video," he noted.
Advances in immersive technology could save banks as much as $1.5 trillion by 2030 with nearly $500 billion coming from virtual reality applications alone, PwC estimates, through the use of VR training or business meetings.
Deloitte estimates that 19% of British firms have invested in VR and augmented reality in 2019 and a further 31% will invest in such technologies by 2021.
Citibank first built an experimental simulated trading environment some years ago when it looked at Microsoft's HoloLens. At a bond conference in Munich last year, Finnish bank Nordea gave investors a virtual tour of its Copenhagen trading floor through VR headsets.
But while there is momentum in the sector, fully effective VR technology must overcome practical constraints such as limited display size, processing power, battery life, and the price tag. For example, Microsoft's HoloLens 2 headsets cost $3,500 apiece - a hefty price for most users. In addition to the expense, wearing VR headsets have reportedly created feelings of nausea and motion sickness for some users. These barriers have limited rapid and wide-spread use of VR headsets among general households, with reportedly only eight percent owning or having access to these devices.
This is where a host of start-ups are trying to get in the market by offering cheaper, simpler ways to smooth remote work. Platforms such as Sococo and Gather provide virtual versions of physical spaces online, in which employees can move about and interact without headsets.
These trends have sparked a new drive for innovation in remote work, with one company leaping into the fray with a disruptive new solution to the challenges of remote work.
At CG Tech, an industrial services conglomerate with companies across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the United Kingdom, executives have been experimenting with the possibilities of VR through their new platform, Virtuworx developed by CG Tech's The Virtulab team.
"Working from home has massively accelerated the interest in virtual and online spaces," said Niall Carroll, chairman of CG Tech.
"The other day, I was finishing a virtual meeting with somebody and as I was walking out of that virtual office, I bumped into a person who was coming in for another meeting and that interaction for a couple of minutes turned into a proper business conversation later - just like it would have done in real life," Carroll added of the experience.
Unlike the typical VR platform, Virtuworx involves a customizable computer-generated environment in which users control digital avatars through a smartphone, tablet, or desktop screen.
Wayne Strydom, Chief Innovation Officer at Virtuworx, noted, "In a virtual environment you are transported into a specifically customized environment, for example, a giant room with a whiteboard and office furniture, in which your digital avatars interact with each other simultaneously to brainstorm ideas. These environments are only limited by your imagination and technological capabilities."
"By creating and hosting these environments, catered to our client's desires, we're hoping to transform remote work into a far more engaging and enriching experience," Niall Carroll asserted. "We believe fun and creativity are powerful drivers of productivity. Virtuworx provides this interaction in ways never imagined before."
For his part, Jason English, CEO of CG Tech, shares his colleagues' convictions that widespread adoption is inevitable. "I think VR technology adoption is going to continue to grow over time and that's exciting for us because the way in which our team has built the virtuworx platform allows it to be converted into an immersive VR experience when the time is right," he said.
Even Zoom Video Communications, one of Virtuworx's biggest competitors, said it expects VR and AR to become a bigger part of online communication in the future.
With that future in mind, CG Tech recently announced an expansion of their development team to bolster its Virtuworx remote work features for educational spaces, conference and exhibition halls, office spaces and meeting rooms to create more creative and inspirational environments.
Moreover, Niall Carroll said, the increase in development capacity seeks to expand Virturworx's features by focusing on "gamification" through the inclusion of voice capabilities and reward features, as well as enhancing widespread accessibility by streamlining downloads and reducing hardware and bandwidth requirements.
Virtuworx to date has been used by thousands and hosted a number of commercial conferences, with additional initiatives in education and remote office work scheduled for 2021.
It seems that the revolution won't be televised, but it might very well be virtualized.
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