Farmers Insurance use of VR for claims adjusters. It’s hard to appreciate a situation you’ve never seen before, and its very expensive to create a large number of situations from broken windows and theft, to accidents, natural disasters and arson. With VR they can create a variety of virtual situations to increase experience of the adjusters, who probably hope they never see some of the situations they find themselves in virtually. (more on Farmers and VR at Forbes).

Walmart brought VR to Black Friday to ensure its retail troops know how to deal with the frantic shopping masses. Decisions about how to handle various situations are evaluated by peers and supervisors. Long-term they are looking to VR as part of the continuous learning arsenal.
UPS now includes corporate training virtual reality in their month-long new employee program so drivers can practice the obstacles they will face on routes.

Corporate Training Virtual Reality remains a good place for the technology to find a home. Simulations are either hard to create (like a fake Black Friday or various examples of theft, property damage and other insurance situations), or already exist but are expensive (like a driving simulator). VR makes one possible and brings down the cost on the other. Once you are inside VR you forget how ridiculous you look to people in the real world. 2018 CES VR didn’t make this any better, in some ways, it made it worse.

Contact CI’s haptic glove prototype looked like something right from a Star Trek Borg assembly kit. The dangling wires and conduits did little to assuage the fear of nerd-purity from the VR canon. That said, if you are in a virtual world, you probably want to touch stuff, and that’s their promise. Feedback to make virtual stuff start to feel real. Important not only for quest games, but also for design work.

The HTC Vive Wireless adapter likewise took one step forward by eliminating the umbilical cord that feeds virtual-ness into the visual cortex, but it made an already clunky looking mask even heavier and odder looking. On the good side, the Vive Pro brought better resolution with 14401600 per eye. Vive Pro also integrates headphones into the headset.