Activating your superpowers: How digital reality can take you from human to hero

Thanks to Digital Reality (DxR), humans are unleashing powerful superpowers previously limited to our imaginations—and the occasional weekend matinee! VR, AR, MR, 360, and immersive technologies allow humans to improve cognition, communications, engagement, and more. Because of them, it really is possible to leap tall buildings in a single bound—and work smarter, better informed, and with deeper insight.

DxR is quickly changing the way we work, communicate, collect and analyze data, and develop rapid solutions to real world problems. In the business world, the real opportunities have only begun to emerge.

At Deloitte Digital, we’ve identified four superpowers that businesses can use to empower their workers. Psychic capabilities encourage collaboration with colleagues from around the world, while animal capabilities offer a heightened sense of awareness of surroundings and the ability to see through barriers. Enhanced human capabilities allow us to engage with information in a way that generates a deeper understanding. Gadgets and wealth facilitate a new way of thinking about everyday problems and finding human-centered solutions.

We may not be able to read minds just yet, but we can create experiences and enable capabilities that allow greater insight, recognition, and understanding. Imagine conversations with experts who are in the room with you, even though they are in another time zone. See IoT data from around the world streamed into a conference room. Through AR/MR field engineering, engineers with specialized expertise can work side by side in the field. Digital reality offers a much more natural way for man to work with machines, and their power together is unstoppable.

What if you could equip your problem solvers with “spidey sense,” a sense of awareness that something is going to happen before it does? Digital reality offers an ability to see things in a completely new way—from a new perspective, a unique angle, even right in the situation with a keener awareness of what is happening all around you. Thanks to immersive technologies, these enhanced capabilities are becoming the new normal.

Digital reality gives human workers the ability to behave like superhumans, enhance their natural abilities, and transform their environments. Too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to train in the real world? No problem, immersive learning offers a hands-on experience. With 3D simulation, doctors can see inside the human body, builders can see through walls—and gain the knowledge to move mountains.

Just as superheroes invented gadgets to deflect menaces, the success of digital reality relies on reimagining everyday products and processes through a human-centered design approach. By asking new questions, we can arrive at new answers. Instead of designing a better alarm clock, what if we could design a better way to wake up? Keeping humans at the core of design thinking could help us go beyond digital reality to truly creative solutions.

Read more about Deloitte Digital Reality. 

Allan Cook is the Digital Reality business leader for Deloitte Consulting LLP and works with a wide variety of organizations to build their innovation strategies, corporate visions, business plans, and implementations of virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and 360° immersive experience. Allan is also the Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications sector leader for operations transformation and has more than 30 years of industry experience.