Stef Keegan: Is Virtual Reality the next big thing?

When I first put on a VR headset I was blown away by the feeling of it. The immersion can be so terrifying.

You can see people stand on a ledge and fear for their life even though they are just standing in their living-room. It's amazing how quickly you can transport people somewhere and they believe it to be true. And emotively, the connection you have with characters in a video game now is so much more, the story and the way people talk to you is as though they are talking to you. And that's really amazing.

Another fun thing about a VR is you can wear an avatar. And you can be anything in VR. So as a shooter you could dress as Henry VIII if you wanted to, roleplay with the children a scene, and that interaction is gonna stick with them way clearer into the future than anything you could teach them out of a book.

It is also very exciting for adult education. You can imagine mounting a camera on top of a surgeon's head while they undertake brain surgery and all of the students being able to watch live while that happens. So the levels of education are huge. And kids might not even have to go to school. The classrooms could be bigger, and then people who may not have access to great education now could just have a headset and be able to access top quality education from home.

Communication is something that I've started really to delve into, more out of hobby than anything else. There are places you can go online, there is one that I like called VRChat, and there are others called Altspace and many more. And what they are, they are places that people in VR go to meet one another. And what I've found is people within there at the moment, the early adopters, are amazing people. Sometimes they are the kind of person who is afraid to leave their house but VR gives them that freedom to meet people round a campfire. Or there are people who have trensgender body issues, who are able to be anyone in VR. And it gives them freedom to be who they are. So I just love the virtual reality giving people this level in their lives they didn't have before now. And I on Sunday nights sit around a campfire, digital campfire with French people, Canadian people, American people and we just talk about our day as if we were really sitting around a campfire. And I love that.

Initial predictions of VR were really optimistic. And now that the headsets are starting to roll out we are getting a more realistic picture of how it's going down, the main reason being that the hardcore units, the Vive and the Oculus are to the average consumer still very expensive. The headsets themselves may not be, the price of those are quite low. But the powerful machines you need to run them are putting the price point up to like 2,000 pounds. And people don't ... it's very rare that you would have that kind of computer just lying around your house. You probably or already are hardcore gamer if you have, and so that's a smaller market. Cheaper options are the Gear VR. The mobile phone market is gonna be embraced much greater by businesses I think. They are nuts, really smaller experiences.

You'll be able to go into a store in VR, walk up a digital isle, pick up a digital t-shirt and try it on your avatar to see if you like it before you purchase it. I imagine Amazon will go that way where you can almost ... Amazon will be like going to a store again.

We have an expression in England called "apples and oranges". It's like comparing two really good things that don't need comparison. AR is gonna be more something we use in day-to-day life. It's gonna be like the movies, like "Minority Report". You can imagine people wearing the hologlasses and having a floating recipe above them while they work in the kitchen. Or having a dashboard display that shows you all the information about your car that you need while you're driving. Or even I had a go on the Google Glass last year, and I was blown away because it allowed me to translate some text on a wall into another language. And I felt like a robot. It's so cool that you're able to do that. So AR is definitely much more a functional tool. It's gonna be almost like smart phones changed our lives, AR is just gonna be that times a hundred. It's gonna be something that I imagine is a longer way off but everyone will be using AR.