We live in a cyber-vulnerable world – a world governed by data. Data encapsulates almost every aspect of our personal and public life. It is heavily shared, distributed, stored and accessed, and it is constantly at risk. Recent mega-hacks, such as the ones on Target, Yahoo, and Ashley Madison, among others, demonstrate that leaking of personal information and misuse of our data are inevitable in a world that is becoming increasingly more connected and data-centric.

As concerning as these hacks are, we should be aware that at the end of the day, the risk is merely the misuse of data. Without question, attacks such as these can have devastating effects on people’s lives, but their outcome is limited to the virtual world and cannot touch the physical world, at least not directly.

See also: The U.S. VA protects your hacking cough from hacking

This is all changing now as our world is gradually developing into a cyber-physical one. Wikipedia defines a cyber-physical system as one where physical and software components are deeply intertwined. That is, physical systems control, and are controlled, by electronic components.

A good example of a cyber-physical system is a modern car, with approximately 60% of its costs associated with electronic engineering. There are often more than 100 electronic units in a modern vehicle that affect critical mechanical and physical components, such as brakes, the steering system and the door lock mechanism.

Another example is a manufacturing plant that is not only monitored by software, but to a large degree, is also controlled by it, often via remote wireless interfaces.

These are only two examples, but many others exist in countless industry verticals, such as intelligent transportation systems, medical devices and home automation — aka the smart home.

Not the same as IoT

A cyber-physical system is closely coupled with, but is not synonymous with, the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are typically the controllers of the cyber-physical domain. They use one or multiple connective technologies (e.g. cellular or Bluetooth) and are governed by service providers or user applications on a mobile device. For instance, the iPhone application provided by your vehicle manufacturer enables you to unlock your car or start the engine remotely. The Amazon Echo smart speaker app that controls your home lighting is another good example.

What is common to these examples is that they allow us, as end users, to wirelessly manipulate physical functions.

Our control over these systems is terminated at the IoT controller (the vehicle telematics system or the smart speaker, respectively). The IoT controllers communicate with physical objects using two key elements – sensors and actuators. Sensors measure properties of the physical world (e.g. the temperature of a centrifuge) and report them to the controller. Actuators manipulate the physical world (e.g. keep the car in its lane) at the command of the controller.

The glue that connects all of this is software in the form of code and data, and it is software, not love, that makes our 21st Century world go ’round. Therein lies the problem – software code inevitably has bugs and design smells, which can potentially lead to serious security issues – what we would call exploitable.

The number of actual exploitable bugs per 1,000 lines of code depends on numerous factors, including what research you care to read. But even by the most optimistic research, the average vehicle, with some 100,000,000 lines of code, is likely to have a few thousand exploitable bugs – that’s what we call a hacker’s paradise.

Before we panic, get rid of our cars and revert to horse-drawn carriages, it is worth noting that cars are safe and that this number does not necessarily represent a few thousand ways in which your car could be manipulated to kill you as you are driving. To truly assess how vulnerable a system is to attack it needs to be thoroughly analyzed. There are many factors to take into account, such as attacker motivation and access to the target. Still, the overall concern is valid, and no less of a valid question is “how did we get here?”

My answer might catch you by surprise. I think that it was almost inevitable that we arrive at this point. History has shown, time and again, that markets are driven by features, with security lagging behind. When the first computers were connected to the Internet, only a handful of experts thought of the issues of its inherent insecure architecture. Of course, they were largely ignored because they didn’t contribute to the bottom line.

The result was that we gradually became acquainted with a world of mystical cyber-creatures, such as viruses, worms and malware. It took time for the industry to react, because it’s always harder to add security to a production environment. Gradually, antivirus programs and firewalls were invented and we managed to move on. PCs are not without their security issues, but the economy didn’t collapse and the sky didn’t fall.

The next wave of connectivity

A similar path could be traced as we moved on to the next wave of connectivity – smart mobile devices and the evolution of IT systems. The security guys are always blowing their whistles at the gate, shouting that we must build in security at the initial design stages, but market drivers are pushing for features, more of them and faster.

Is the same happening in the IoT world? Recent data suggests that this is indeed the case. So, you might be comforted by the premise that we let the dynamic of technology run its course, adding in security as an afterthought, the same way we did in the past. However, there is one very important observation, one which I would like to be the takeaway of this article – the tolerance for error falls dramatically every time we become more dependent on software.

We have managed to overcome loss of data on our personal computers and hacked phones. We struggle with colossal data breaches to credit cards databases and our most personal information. Will we be able to cope with a real mega-hack that compromises, or worse yet, irrevocably harms, our physical world?

A better idea might be to invest in security by design. Those experts might be right this time around.

VB Profiles Connected Cars Landscape

This article is part of our connected cars series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 250 companies here.

The idea of creating better cities is as old as human settlement. Smart cities is our latest iteration, amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution, now that we have exponentially more data and computing power available affordably. This article will focus on illuminating three counterintuitive trends I have observed with smart cities.

Trend 1: Cheap sensors are not enough

There is a widely ingrained belief that having cheap sensors means we will be able to deploy great products and services to manage water, energy or traffic in our cities. Indeed, the cost of sensors has more than halved in a decade but what hasn’t changed yet is the actual placement of these sensors into the end devices. So if you are trying to do vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication, outside of a few highly specialized environments, you simply don’t have enough sensors on the road to be able to do anything meaningful.

Even if you are a well-capitalized company you may face the chasm of adoption, like the cautionary tale of iBeacons. Anyone wishing to innovate within smart cities needs to contend that creating highly specialized environments may actually be a precondition, and potentially pushing them through policy a postcondition.

Amit Garg, Principal, Samsung NEXT Ventures

Trend 2: Be iterative & leapfrog

Leapfrog approaches are the stuff that innovators, especially in Silicon Valley, talk about. Take a radically different approach and disrupt this industry, so goes the mantra. When it comes to smart cities I think nothing could be further from truth. Our technology progresses often much faster than our ability to adapt to them and when it comes to adjusting to new ways of living, potentially even relocating, it just adds a significant barrier.

Case in point, the successful smart city projects are being incubated in vibrant places with a long-standing culture of innovation, whether it be Singapore or Songdo right outside of Seoul. Starting from scratch on the other hands has had setbacks, whether championed by a strong government in Masdar City or a powerful corporation in Celebration, USA. I believe iterative approaches are the way to go ie incremental improvements in a city’s infrastructure rather than drastic overhauls.

Trend 3: You do not need scale

We live in an increasingly urban world — 2007 is widely seen as the year when for the first time in history there were more humans living in cities than in rural areas. But the trend is hyper-urbanization, with people concentrating even more in a few cities, and most of those mega cities increasingly in Asia and Africa.

This means that if you are developing an innovation around smart cities you may not need to get to scale in hundreds of cities, just a few markets might actually do it. In fact, if you can get an innovation working fully even in one mega city you may create a hugely successful company with the due caveat that a single point of failure, especially in an area rife with policy, is a high risk.

The author is currently a Principal at Samsung NEXT Ventures, which houses our early-stage investment arm, headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley. I focus on software, especially Internet & consumer technologies, investing $250K to $3M in seed, series A or B, and helping them partner with Samsung to grow and make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the world around us. This may look like a bold statement to many, but that’s the truth. From elevators to planes, there will be 30 billion connected devices in the next three years. Clearly, IoT is moving fast, and tech giants are taking bold measures to constantly push the boundaries of what can be achieved with the IoT.

The recent Genius of Things Summit that was organized in Munich, Germany was a demonstration of how IBM’s unrivaled IoT ecosystem is changing the way we live, work, and play. Here are a few notable developments that caught my interest.

Digital twin

The traditional way of conceptualizing, designing, and developing a product is time- and resource-intensive. Digital twin is an initiative to improve the efficiency of the process by using cloud-based virtual image of an asset maintained throughout the lifecycle. The asset, in turn, remains accessible to every individual involved in the process, thereby allowing people to work collaboratively, reduce errors, and improve efficiency.

Airbus and Schaeffler are the two companies that are currently using digital twin engines and bearings. Airbus is using this technology to create a digital thread that allows different engineering divisions to collaborate. This way, in case a problem is discovered, the company can explore whether the product is due to inadequate maintenance, poor manufacturing, or a fault in the design.

Cognitive commerce

The ultimate objective of cognitive commerce is to offer a truly personalized service to customers based on their precise preferences. To achieve this, a wide spectrum of technologies is used, from speech recognition to machine learning.

Visa is working in collaboration with IBM to offer its customers the flexibility to make payments from any IoT connected device. This, in turn, will eliminate the need to carry sensitive financial information embossed on payment cards, thereby making the customer journey simpler, easier, and more secure.

Predictive maintenance

As the name implies, predictive technology analyzes the data collected using sensors to predict the maintenance needs of an asset. This, in turn, improves asset availability, reduces maintenance costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

SNCF, which is a leading freight and passenger transport service, has collaborated with IBM to connect its entire rail system to the IoT ecosystem. Using the data collected from sensors, SNCF will be able to predict repair and maintenance needs of its trains and tracks, improve the security and availability of its assets, and reduce the downtimes associated with unexpected downtimes.

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has the power to change our world, we are still at the beginning of the transformational journey that will revolutionize the way we live and work for the better. In the next few years, we can expect to see incredible advancements being made by tech giants, such as IBM and other companies.

Virtual Reality garnered plenty of headlines this past year. Most of the coverage – from former President Barack Obama virtually visiting Yosemite National Park to Fox live streaming the Super Bowl – focused on the entertainment possibilities inherent in the technology. But many companies and organizations are taking advantage of Virtual Reality for more practical reasons: VR training apps.

See also: When virtual pets roam our houses

According to TrainingIndustry.com, $160 billion in North America and over $355 billion worldwide was spent on training in 2015. The total expenditures have grown every year since 2009. Those numbers indicate a robust market for companies providing training services, but also one that is ripe for disruption by technology such as Virtual Reality.

VR has a lot of strengths that make it a natural fit for training: it’s immersive, interactive, memorable, and scalable. For large scale training, you can distribute VR apps easily through a combination of cost-effective headsets like Google Cardboard and an iOS or Android app. For more in-depth training, requiring long-form or high-quality video, the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung Gear VR provide the perfect hardware.

John Alonso, owner of Inlet Shores Group, now offers VR training app creation and distribution as a core service offering at his consultancy. He turned to the technology when a client approached him about training employees for a job they would be performing. “The classroom training, the extensive videos did not give an adequate representation of what the job would be like,” according to Alonso.

Enter virtual reality.

Alonso’s team now specializes in creating long-form 360 training apps, particularly for Gear VR. Beyond just capturing immersive video, they augment their content with titling, narration, and animations. The mobile Samsung phones and headsets they use to display the training apps are easily distributed across multiple office locations.

One of the early adopters of Alonso’s VR training approach has been a division of the government. “Our Federal customer had been using video-based learning for multiple years,” Alonso said. “While video can be effective, it does not put you ‘in the place.’ It doesn’t provide the fidelity that was required. The only other solution was going to the physical place, but this was not financially viable.”

Among the many benefits to utilizing training apps is cost savings. Bringing in trainers, or transporting employees to a different location, involves both real costs (airline tickets, hotels) and intangible costs (lost productivity time). The location and time independent nature of VR makes it so students or employees can learn through VR in a classroom, at home, or practically anywhere. For budget-conscious clients, like divisions of the government, the cost savings can be substantial and important.

VR works best for dangerous situations

VR training is also particularly well-suited for recreating simulated dangerous situations. UK-based Cineon Productions, started by University of Exeter Professor Dr. Sam Vine, is creating immersive 360 experiences for “safety critical” jobs. Beyond just replicating a dangerous environment, they’re also taking an analytical approach at user interaction with the VR experiences, looking at eye tracking data.

This allows them to predict during a real emergency where the employee focus might be, and subsequently, help train employees on how to better approach the real situation in the future. If you’re able to correctly act in a simulated environment, the theory goes, you’re more likely to replicate that in the real world.

The market opportunity for production companies and consultancies looking to get into VR training is robust. At Inlet Shores Group, one client went from a small prototype with 10 headsets deployed to increasing their content 15x and deploying over 200+ Samsung Gear VR headsets.

The cost to the content producer, outside of the additional headset hardware, is not significantly more than traditional platforms. And with web-based VR app creation platforms, like my company’s, the editing and deployment time is no more than traditional methods, and sometimes much faster.

As the cost of Virtual Reality publishing goes down, and the number of head-mounted displays purchased increases, expect more companies to embrace the power of VR for training. It’s a natural fit for an industry that, outside the introduction of internet-based learning, hasn’t seen much disruption since the turn of the century. And the results so far have been positive. According to Alonso, “There is real excitement around VR training apps. We hear repeatedly how it is ‘more than they expected.’”

This article is part of our Virtual Reality series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 431 companies here.

A good treadmill for home use costs around $1,000. A treadmill for use in a health club could be ten times more expensive. Why would club owners agree to pay so much more? Because they understand that the home equipment would not withstand the heavy use in a club.

The same is true for VR goggles. Goggles for home use are not suitable for sustained use in arcades and amusement parks. Both VR vendors and attraction operators need to understand and address these differences.

Durability is one key issue. A goggle in an amusement park is subject to both accidental and intentional abuse. A kid might try to see if a lens can pop out. Someone else might wish to take a component as a souvenir.

See also: How VR training apps are becoming reality

Hygiene is also important. VR experiences can be intense, and parks can be in hot and humid areas. Whether it is sweat, suntan lotion or something else, a guest does not wish to wear a soaked or dirty goggle. This is true not only for the face mask, but for any built-in headphones.

Sweat and humidity might also cause fogging on the lenses. If a guest has to take off the goggles to defog them, the break in VR immersion degrades the experience.

Depending on the attraction, visitors can be of all ages. Good physical fit is important, regardless if the visitor is a small kit or a large man. Goggles must accommodate a wide range of head sizes, and eye separation. Eyeglasses also present a design challenge. Visitors prefer to keep them on, so goggle vendors try to make room for them.

Beyond the customer-facing experience, there are important operational considerations. Attractions make money by providing a unique experience to a large number of visitors. Every minute spent by a guest adjusting straps in a roller-coaster, is a minute lost. Some have reported a 30% decrease in guest throughput after upgrading a roller coaster to VR. A larger park crew assisting guests or maintaining headsets means larger operational costs.

There are several different types of public VR experiences, each with unique challenge. A free-roam experience (e.g. Zero Latency) needs to address backpack PCs and controllers. Themed experiences such as The Void have accessories that supplant the story. These accessories have many of the same challenges. A small attraction in a shopping mall cannot afford a large operating crew. A VR roller coaster might need a chin strap to keep the goggles on the head. If a VR roller coaster relies on standard phones, they might overheat or need to recharge often.

Often, the first instinct of those building VR attractions is to do everything. They might try to build their own goggles, create content, or even a tracking system. Over time, they focus on their core competencies, bringing external vendors for everything else.

Testing is a work in progress

The first generation of these solutions show the immense promise of public VR.

VR Coaster, for instance, has deployed GearVR-based roller coaster experiences in over 20 parks. These use a special tracking system to determine the position of each car at any time. The Void and Zero Latency use backpack PCs to allow guests to explore unique spaces. Talon Simulations provides flight and driving simulations in malls. IMAX opened a VR center where guests can try a variety of 10-minute VR experiences. Most of these first-generation solutions use consumer-grade hardware.

Operators realize that many problems still need solutions. At the same time, consumers learn what they like and dislike in current solutions.

HMD vendors are also rising to the challenge. ImmersiON-VRelia has developed phone-based goggles that feature a reinforced plastic construction. Sensics released goggles with detachable face mask to address both hygiene and operational efficiency.

What’s missing? Low-latency wireless video solutions to get rid of cables. Faster ways to adjust goggles for guest. Better methods to clean goggles between guests. Phones that don’t overheat. Multi-user experiences with a stronger social aspect. The passage of time to see what works and what doesn’t. VR standards to help integrate new devices into compelling experiences.

I am excited what public VR experiences could be. My excitement comes both from a user standpoint – these experiences are fun! – and also from a problem-solver view – the problems are challenging.

Try these experiences next time you can. Going to a movie theater provides a different experience than watching at home. Going through a good public VR experience is beyond what VR at home provides.

This article is part of our Virtual Reality series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 431 companies here.