Virtual Reality – the 6PR interview
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
If you want more of this thinking while it’s still a signal, not a headline, subscribe to Immediate Futures.
If you want ongoing access to everything I do for clients, packaged for you, with direct access to me, join the Signal Room.
If you’re considering bringing this work into your conference, boardroom, or organisation, enquire here.
Choose Forward.
Virtual reality creates immersive, computer-generated environments that respond to the user’s presence. While gaming showcased it early, the significance for organisations lies in training, simulation, healthcare, and empathy-building. Virtual reality changes what is possible in human learning and experience — and that has serious implications for how we prepare people for complex, high-stakes situations.
Companies in mining, healthcare, and defence are already deploying virtual reality for safety training, surgical simulation, and high-risk scenario rehearsal. The value is straightforward: people can practise situations that would be dangerous, expensive, or impossible to replicate in the real world. As headset costs fall and content quality improves, the adoption curve across Australian industry is accelerating.
Cost and content quality are real barriers, but the deeper risk is deploying virtual reality without a clear purpose. VR for its own sake rarely delivers value. Organisations that see results start with a defined learning or experience objective, then design the environment around it. Without that discipline, the technology becomes a novelty that fails to transfer into real-world capability or behaviour change.
Virtual reality sits at the most immersive end of a wider spatial computing spectrum that includes augmented and mixed reality. These technologies are converging, and AI-generated environments are accelerating that shift. Understanding where virtual reality sits on that spectrum helps organisations make better investment decisions, rather than treating each technology as a separate, isolated experiment.
Watch for the governance questions to arrive before most organisations are ready. As headsets become affordable and social VR platforms mature, the issues will not be technical — they will be about identity, consent, psychological safety, and data in virtual environments. Most organisations have not begun thinking about how they will govern immersive experiences. That gap will need attention sooner than leaders expect.
