Five Reasons Why Virtual Reality Will Make Marketing (and Life) Better
Update: Around August 15, we release VRTÜL on iOS. 360° design for 360° video. Sign up to be an early adopter here: www.vrtul.io
Did you know that color TV made its entry into India in 1982?
That goes to show that even the most pervasive of technologies in the world didn’t really spread that fast.
Maybe it will be different for VR, with code and fast-moving distribution platforms like Facebook pushing information about it into people’s homes and pockets.
Still, I don’t hold my breath. For now, the phone and the content that works on the phone seems to be the bigger bet, and more people own smartphones around the world that can support video than have money to buy a VR Headset like FOVE or Oculus Rift.
Back when my mother and father were kids, TVs started appearing in everyone’s homes, and not long after that, America sent a few men to the moon. Even then, TV was a rare product. People would sit around the ones owned by the well-off families.
Everyone gathered around the sets in the living room, at the soda shop, and at the office, and watched this and other epic moments in human history.
VR will soon have this moment.
You can already feel that the arrival of VR, and the lowering of its costs, means that artists, brands, and the niche users of the technology are already having their epic moment in history. But what is going to bring it all together?
I argue that it won’t be an epic moment in history. It will hit each of us in a personal way through the storytelling or visual expression of an artist or brand. Because people are hungry for real stories.
This moment will likely come through the mobile phone, and not through Oculus Rift, because my thinking is that Oculus is still a few years away from being A. affordable, and B. understood by the mainstream. It is still living in the minds of the technorati and the leading edge thinkers.
There are unique characteristics of VR that make it an incredible tool for doing marketing business and selling products and services. When you combine the role of marketing — creating a bond around information and a product that improves people’s lives — with the ability to hold people’s attention with mobile, you have history in the making.
Here are our five qualities that make video VR on mobile the next iteration of VR, and why it’s so amazing.
- VR goes beyond language
- Consumers control the VR journey
- Brands can show off the way their products work, not just describe them
- Information delivery creates knowledge and a bond
- Video artists will have a more engaged, integrated audience of the experience or story
When you put all of these together, you not only get a pretty apt description of VR, but you see its enormous potential.
How awesome is it that you can turn on the super computer in your pocket that you have today and with 360° video catch a glimpse of another world as if you are looking through a mirror?
It’s probably about as epic and revolutionary as when TVs started emerging in everyone’s home.
