Virtual Reality technology has evolved dramatically in the past few years and is set to hit mainstream markets in 2016. While gaming applications attract most of the attention, there are many other use cases that could have a much larger impact on our lives.

VentureRadar tracks 100s of emerging innovators in virtual reality so we decided to pick out 25 leading examples that highlight the wide range of use cases that exist. If predictions are true, we might be spending the majority of our waking time in virtual reality by 2020, so the use cases below could become very familiar to you in the near future.

“Virtual reality is the last medium… …you’re essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth” – Chris Milk, CEO, Vrse

The 25 use cases and innovators we’ve selected are:

Sports Spectating: Livelike / @LiveLikeVR

Architecture: IrisVR / @vrviz

Journalism : Emblematicgroup / @EmblematicGroup

Industrial Training : EON Reality /@EONRealityInc

Mental Health : CleVR / @CleVRBV

Workspaces : Mure VR /@vrBreakroom

Social Networking : AltspaceVR / @AltspaceVR

Shopping : Trillenium / @Trillenium3D

Gaming: Cyberith /@Cyberith

Cinema: Jaunt / @jauntvr

Pain Relief : DeepStream VR /@deepstreamvr

Meditation: Guided Meditation VR (by Cubicle Ninjas) / @CubicleNinjas

Travel: Marriott Hotels (working with Relevent and Framestore)

Surgery Training : Conquer Mobile / @conquermobile

Cognitive Training: Cerevrum / @CEREVRUMGAME

Recruitment: Wade & Wendy / @wadeandwendy

Religious Pilgrimage : Mecca 3D / @mecca3d_net

Education : Unimersiv / @Unimersiv

Courtroom: Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Zurich

Manufacturing: Virtalis / @Virtalis

Big Data Visualisation: Masters of Pie with Lumacode (@mastersofpie and @lumacode)

Marketing: 10x Army / @10xArmy

Flying: FLYBi / @FlybiDrone

Sports Training : STRIVR Labs / @STRIVRlabs

Automotive Design: WorldViz / @WorldViz