Virtual reality technology is here to stay and it’s going to play a much bigger part in our lives a few years from now. Headsets like the Gear VR are doing wonders for mainstream adoption of VR and with other headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR in the pipeline for 2016, things will certainly be heating up in the VR space. HTC has been hard at work promoting the Vive and it’s now going to deploy the headset at Audi’s flagship showrooms in the coming year where customers will be able to review and even test drive Audi cars.
It goes without saying that virtual reality is the perfect medium for allowing customers to properly explore a car without even having to drive it out of the showroom, sure they can still do that, but bringing in VR technology will provide customers with an entirely different way of exploring a car that they might end up spending their money on.
HTC chairperson Cher Wang says that this cooperation shows the integration between business activities and virtual reality, pointing out that these headsets can also prove to be useful in industries like fashion, entertainment, education, media and even medicare. The company will work with government agencies as well to deploy Vive and enable them to promote new policies or tourism initiatives.
It hasn’t been confirmed if a similar arrangement will be made with other car manufacturers as well, perhaps we might see the Vive pop up in showrooms of other brands that operate under the Volkswagen group like Audi does. As far as the consumer version of this headset is concerned HTC is yet to provide a confirmed release date for the consumer version of the Vive headset.
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