Box (BOX), the Redwood City, Calif.-based cloud-based file-sharing and collaboration business, is developing virtual reality applications that could help change the way people work.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Yahoo Finance recently, chief executive Aaron Levie contended the cloud-based file-sharing and collaboration business, which beat Wall Street estimates last quarter with EPS of -$0.18 on revenues of $90 million, has a lot of untapped potential beyond recent products it has recently rolled out.

That potential includes virtual reality, which Deloitte estimates will become a billion-dollar industry this year. According to Levie, Box is currently developing several VR projects where you can interact with 3-D models stored in Box using the company’s 3-D viewing technology and an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset.

“Every single industry, every single job function will deal with this a little bit differently,” predicted Levie. “If you’re a radiologist, machine learning and A.I. will help you more quickly diagnose a medical image you’re looking at. If you are in finance, you should be able to more correctly spot different kinds of data trends happening across your business with your financial information. If you’re a sales rep, computers should probably tell which kinds of customers are most ripe to buy your product.”

Ask Box Levie about the business he co-founded with CFO Dylan Smith in 2005, and it’s clear Levie prefers to spend time thinking about Box’s medium- to long-term prospects like VR rather than quarterly earnings — a topic he’ll focus on when Box reports its second-quarter fiscal year 2017 earnings on August 31 after the markets close.

“There are a lot of things that we do, particularly in jobs that are heavily reliant in the physical world: construction, manufacturing, and architecture,” Levie said. “It’s pretty strange we’re limited to this window, that’s like limited to 18 inches into the view of what we’re actually doing is in the physical world and realistic to the proportions of the physical world. And what VR allows us to do is sort of recreate the physical world in a digital space in a way that is realistic and immersive and interactive.”

“It’s pretty obvious once you do this, this is how cars are going to be made in the future and how buildings are going to be put together in the future, and we’re just at the very nascent stages where most of the attention is going to the consumer, the gaming, the sort of entertainment side,” Levie added. “But there are probably going to be 10x the number of cases on the enterprise side, and we’re just at the early stages of seeing where those are.”

Levie also sees Box and other companies in the space helping drive advancements in machine learning, whereby computers can evolve in their utility without humans having to program them to do so.

Over the last 18 months, it’s already rolled out products including Governance, which essentially helps clients manage information while meeting legal, regulatory, and business policies, and an IBM partnership that has the two companies collaborating on the development of new products.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

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