Gaming and entertainment may be the most popular area for today’s virtual reality market but the technology is evolving fast, and soon it will touch so many aspects of our lives. Virtual reality offers the potential to fundamentally change how we learn, interact, and recover through a variety of potential applications in academia, healthcare, advocacy and journalism.

Speaking during a panel session at VERGE conference in Santa Clara California, Roy Taylor, the Corporate VP of AMD cited virtual reality as an amazing chance to build empathy and understand others.

“Virtual Reality is not going to be big, it’s going to be everything. It is going to change everything” said Roy Taylor, “At AMD we are not only making computer chips, we are building the future. Virtual reality gives us the chance to be bigger than ourselves. It gives amazing opportunities for healthcare, education and storytelling.”

I made a lot of people cry…

Nonny de la Peña, founder and CEO of Emblematic Group who shared the stage with Roy, mentioned her past work with Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus.

“Back in 2010’s Palmer helped me to build VR goggles and then he went on to Kickstarter to start his own company, which was later acquired by Facebook for $2 billion dollars. I think this is a great example to show the value of what we have been working on. It’s great to see that.”

Palmer Luckey was one of Nonny de la Peña’s interns at University of Southern California.

Nonny de la Peña is known for her immersive journalism works based on real-life stories that create deep empathy for viewers through VR goggles. Several of her works like Hunger in LA or Project Syria were debuted at the past Sundance Festivals.

“These stories have been quite impactful amongst the viewers” said Nonny, “I know that I made a lot of people cry. One of the things that we must understand is that violence is not fun” she added.

Project Syria by Nonny de la Peña

What do we need to advance virtual reality?

According to Roy Taylor “curiosity and access” are the two key words to make virtual reality popular in the next yeats. “We need as many people as much to get access to these technologies” he said “We need to get virtual reality in movie theaters, shopping malls so that more people gets the chance to try. Once we give access to these technologies, they’ll be curious to explore more.”

What is the next step for virtual reality technology?

Regarding a question by the panel moderator Heather Clancy, senior writer for GreenBiz, Roy Taylor mentioned the merging of 360 videos and interactive experiences.

“Currently there are two ways to experience virtual reality. There is 360 degree image technology that you shoot with high quality cameras like Samsung. Through these images you can look around and get yourself immersed in an environment but there is no interaction. The other one is the interactive experiences designed with game engines like Unity or Unreal. I think in the future we will see brand new technologies that bring these two together, and that won’t be very long.