Almost 85% of manufacturers hope to increase their use of virtual reality (VR) technology for customer service, according to research.
A study by Oracle has shown 38% of manufacturers are already using VR tech for customer service, but 84% of firms hope to increase this deployment over the next three years.
Mark de Groot, marketing director for digital customer experience at Oracle, said VR has been used in manufacturing prior to now, but using it for customer interaction is a recent development.
Almost half of manufacturers are already using VR and automation technology, with 89% wanting to increase the use of this tech by 2020.
“We’re seeing companies taking advantage of virtual reality to give buyers a first hand, immersive view of the products they eventually stand to receive,” he said. “Turning to post-sales service, automation technologies give customers the freedom to manage orders at their own discretion without having to wait on a company’s service team.”
Customers are becoming increasingly used to using their smartphones to interact with businesses , and many customers expect virtual reality to play a huge part in the future of retail .
Oracle’s research found 36% of manufacturing and engineering firms say their customers prefer to interact with their brand through applications rather than speak to a member of staff.
By 2020, 90% of manufacturers plan to offer purpose-built apps for their customers, and 89% hope to use automation for customer experience in the future.
Many manufacturers have been using customer data to understand their audience, with around half of manufacturers doing so.
This is more than in some other sectors, such as telecoms, where only 37% of firms look to customer data, and retail, where 44% of online retailers use data to understand their audience.
But 40% of manufacturing firms were found to struggle with customer data, and do not know how to use it to offer a better service.
“It’s encouraging to see the manufacturing and high tech industries lead the way in their use of data to get closer to their audience, but without insight into how customers react to the service they receive, companies will largely be left guessing how they can improve customer experience,” said De Groot.
Offering a poor service can be detrimental to firms. With an increased choice of services offered through technology, customers are more likely to use another brand if they receive a poor customer experience.

© Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450410484/Most-manufacturers-will-use-customer-facing-VR-by-2020
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A new rival has emerged to take on Facebook’s React JavaScript library for building UIs: Inferno, designed to be a lightweight and “blazing fast React-like Javascript library” for building modern interfaces.
“Inferno is considerably faster than React,” says the project’s web page. “This doesn’t apply to only benchmarks, but real-world applications that companies have converted to Inferno from React. ” The library also is only 9KB, which means it parses faster, particularly on mobile devices.
Inferno has a React-compatible API and can use React tools extensions for Chrome and Firefox. It has a partially synthetic event system, opting to only delegate certain events, such as onClick.
The goal with Inferno is to provide all the benefits of React, plus other features for people already familiar with the React ecosystem, including lifecycle events on functional components, server-side render streams, better real-world performance, lower memory consumption, and faster parse/load times, according to the project’s GitHub repo. “Furthermore, Inferno allows people to switch their existing React projects to Inferno in a few lines of code using inferno-compat. ”
In developing Inferno, builders were seeking a UI library that could improve experience, battery, memory usage, and performance on mobile devices. Instead of using MVC/MVVM style patterns, Inferno uses a component-based approach in which data flows in one direction. This makes coding predictable, re-usable, and highly testable, proponents said. “You literally write JavaScript to state how you’d like your UI to look — Inferno does all the rest. ”
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Dell today announced the UltraSharp 4K Monitor, which the company says is the first of its kind. The resolution is four times that of 4K UHD, so it’s a whopping 7860×4320.
The display is 32-inches, but if you look at the bottom-left corner of the photo, you can see just how tiny the taskbar is. Dell told us that it’s really not meant for text-based menus at all, and it’s designed for creating. Note that that’s at 100% scaling.
If you’re wondering what kind of cable can power 33.2 million pixels, it uses two DisplayPort 1.3 cables. While just one can power 8K at 30hz, you’ll need two for 60hz. Aside from that, Dell says that it can produce over a billion colors, and it has a 100% Adobe color gamut.
Coming in at under $5,000, the company says that eventually the price will come down, as tends to be the case with any new technology, comparing it to 4K a couple years ago.
We’ll likely see more 8K monitors as time goes on from other companies, but do you think that all of those pixels are necessary? Let us know in the comments.

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