Application of social virtual reality platforms and decision support systems in business

Author
Affiliations

Dmytro Elishys

PhD student, Kyiv National Economic University, named after Vadym Hetman

damianelishys@gmail.com

The relevance of innovative information technology applications comes across all spheres of business activity. In this context, it is essential to use new tools for decision-making, including those previously underused in such ways, one of which is virtual reality (VR). Combining basic approaches using decision support systems (DSS), social platforms, and spatial data processing introduces new perspectives for applying immersive technologies in business.

Although VR-based social platforms emerged years ago, and various researchers suggested using them before [4, p. 3; 5, p. 6], including some conceptual [3, p. 86] and practical [2, p. 67] applications for software developers, it is the very idea of combining this kind of a platform with a decision support system (DSS) that is new and promising, which makes it a relevant issue for research in this field.

Some of the well-known social VR platforms include Bigscreen, ChilloutVR, Meta Horizon, Microsoft Mesh, Mozilla Hubs, Resonite, Sansar, VRChat, the last of which is quite popular, flexible, and appears to be a good option for recreational activities [5, p. 12], as well as provides opportunities to publish content using the Unity toolkit [4, p. 4]. Harnessing such tools opens new opportunities for the use of virtual content, such as digital twins, which can be helpful in familiarizing users with an object in VR before interacting with its real-life equivalent in fields such as surgery, mechanical engineering, robotics, tourism, military, education, and more [1, p. 67]. In summary, using VR presents new opportunities by offering an immersive experience, which could be convenient enough to optimize various business tasks and solutions. As an example of the practical application of a VR-based DSS, this paper introduces the case of viewing digital twins of tourist attractions in virtual worlds published on a social VR platform. In the suggested scenario, the user explores virtual worlds with digital twins of real-life environments uploaded to the social VR platform (for example, VRChat) and evaluates them using a DSS overlay, i.e., an additional layer of the user interface (UI), with the additional functionality provided by extra software modules developed as parts of the system.

According to the presented Business Process Modeling Notation diagram, in the context of the involved tasks (Figure 1), we can consider the following three lanes: + social VR platform providing access to publishing and viewing custom-made virtual worlds; + VR DSS overlay, created using a game engine, such as Unity or Unreal Engine, that provides an additional user interface layer powered by software modules to provide data management; + database management system (DBMS) as a tool used for saving and retrieving object evaluations and additional user data — such systems include, for example, Amazon DynamoDB, Google Cloud Firestore, and MongoDB. + So, by utilizing VR as a content consumption medium, the user experience acquires the ability to integrate DSS tools during the inspection of virtual objects and environments for further data management tasks to make a decision. The use of VR combined with experiences provided by social platforms creates new opportunities for the real-time assessment of options, which has the potential to contribute to the optimization of the decision-making process for businesses considering the use of virtual content to solve existing practical problems, which, in particular, is relevant in the areas of VR application, especially combined with the use of digital twins.

Figure 1: VR DSS application using the social VR platform user data

References

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