Can Virtual Reality Overtake Driverless Cars?

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Driverless cars and electric vehicles mean the transport world will undergo huge upheaval in the next decade. Vehicle safety, ownership patterns and insurance models will all be affected, as will work, leisure and manufacturer business models.

It is already happening. Vehicles using some form of autonomous driving, aided by computer vision, are starting to appear on the streets of cities in the US, China, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands. Not only cars, but vans, trucks, buses and even drones are using artificial intelligence to navigate the environment with complex sets of sensors. Corporations and governments are beginning to build the infrastructure and draft the regulations needed for this new era.

However, we think autonomous transportation will itself be disrupted by another powerful technology – virtual reality.

Alongside physical autonomous transportation, the future may also bring ‘virtual transportation’ and eventually the two are likely to be in competition with each other.

The changes could be momentous. Autonomous transport offers commuters and travellers the prospect of increased safety, lower travel costs and reduced city congestion. But, if virtual reality is widely adopted, physically transporting people could be considered as inefficient, inconvenient and slow.

It might eventually be preferable to ‘travel’ for work and social purposes via virtual reality.

Virtual reality creates a sense of ‘presence’ that allows users to feel as if they are in another place entirely – regardless of whether that location is imaginary or a replication of reality. Additionally, it allows people to be social remotely – offering a much more immersive experience than other forms of communication like the simple telephone call or even video-conferencing.

The next generation may find it preferable to travel ‘virtually’ rather than ‘physically’.

The implications are enormous. Autonomous transportation is likely to disrupt car-making and driving jobs, but virtual reality will create a swathe of technical roles, including filling these new virtual worlds with 3D content.

The housing market could be affected as well as offices: virtual reality could allow us to live in a very small room but have the experience of living virtually in a mansion. Cutting out commuting could mean less need to live near cities. And if we drive fewer miles, that reduces the need for physical transportation infrastructure.

Perfecting autonomous transportation will involve substantial economic and intellectual capital. Countries are likely to upgrade their current physical infrastructure by adding a digital element, transforming old 20th century infrastructure with artificial-intelligence-driven transportation networks to create ‘smart cities’.

That’s not to say that autonomous-transportation infrastructures will quickly become redundant in a virtual reality-centric society. But, instead of transporting people as their primary use, they may convey physical items that cannot be replicated in virtual reality, such as food, medicine or clothes.

We believe autonomous transportation – vehicles or drones – can co-exist with virtual reality. While autonomous entities transport physical things, virtual reality will take people to virtual places that could eventually be indistinguishable from the actual locations on which they are modelled. This could bring closer the day when everybody can not only have anything they want, anytime they want, but also be anywhere they want, any time they desire.