Virtual Reality is one of the hottest trends in marketing right now — every agency is talking about it, every media outlet is covering it, every futurist is hyping it, and many are beginning to experiment in this new medium.
And with good reason — the promise of VR is palpable and powerful — personal movie-quality interactive experiences that completely immerse the viewer.
But the medium has challenges.
Taking up a person’s entire field of vision can be an odd experience — you are literally blind to the world around you.
This is not something that predator-sensitive mammals are particularly comfortable with, and it’s an experience that can be quite isolating — a potential drawback for highly social creatures.
A different perspective
Which makes recent the collaboration between Lockheed Martin, McCann New York and Framestore so inspiring.
Lockheed wanted to give school-children the experience of a “Field Trip to Mars”, and virtual reality seemed the ideal medium — but not the “virtual reality” we’re used to hearing about.
This brilliant experience set the headset aside, and was designed as a shared exploration of a virtual world — giving school children an amazing sense of what it would be like to take a field trip to a different planet.
It rightly won two golds and a silver at the 2016 Cannes Lions.
Hardware is hard
The experience was so compelling because it didn’t make people put on a headset and it didn’t cut them off from one another.
But this experience does share a drawback that also limits headset-driven VR — it is tied directly to a set of hardware, and as such, it doesn’t readily scale.
As Alexander Rea, Head of Creative Technology at Framestore, put it:
Distribution is limited, and housing these experiences is costly. That means fewer people get to experience them.
Distributing and democratising the Virtual
This is indeed a problem for many Virtual Experiences — you have to be physically engaged with a set of expensive hardware — be it a headset or a highly tricked-out bus.
But it doesn’t need to be this way.
You can deliver personal interactive movie-quality experiences over the Internet.
We’ve developed a technology that allows anyone to engage with virtual worlds direct in their web browser.
Rather than doing things on a nearby computer that you’re physically connected to, we build and host virtual experiences in the Cloud, and then stream the output as video direct into a web page that contains all the controls the user needs to interact with the experience.
This type of experience could have a number of applications.
The most obvious for marketers would be to help people really see and experience products before they buy them — particularly in categories that are high consideration or have many options to choose from.
An example from automotive
People really love a sense of “rehearsed ownership” before they buy a specific car, and with good reason — it’s a big ticket item and there are often an awful lot of options to choose from.
At the moment, car configurators are generally “pre-rendered” — the imagery is created in advance, and all the user can do is simply click between the options of a somewhat interactive brochure.
We deliver interactive virtual experiences in the browser, making the car configurator less like a brochure, and more like an interactive movie.
And because this virtual experience has a gaming engine’s light, sound, physics and interaction, once you’ve configured your car, you can see (and hear) what it would be like out on the road:
And because we do all the hard work in the Cloud, this is an experience delivered in a website in the browser on your desktop, mobile or tablet — the place where customers spend most of their time researching their next purchase.
Automotive is one obvious place where this technology could be used — but real estate, designer manufactures or personalised products are other obvious applications.
“Virtual” experiences at scale and convenience
For brands that want to use “virtual”, computer-generated experiences to showcase their products or tell new types of stories to their customers, this distribution at scale has a number of advantages.
Where your customers already are
All the customer needs is a device with a web browser that can display video — mobile, tablet or PC.
This experience is delivered within a brand’s existing website, where customers already look for products and brand stories.
No plug-ins, no downloads, no hardware
Because all the graphics data and processing are held in the Cloud, and the output is video streamed, there is no need for plug-ins, apps, or big downloads — people just arrive at a web page, and the experience is right there for them from the get-go.
Customers don’t need to buy a headset, or upgrade their PC, or go to a specific location to experience this virtual world.
A huge addressable market
This isn’t years away in the future when everyone has bought a headset, this is for anyone who is online today, using the devices they already own in the places they already go.
Looking past the headset
At rtobjects, we believe that real-time computer generated imagery is the next frontier of digital media— personal interactive movie-quality experiences will deliver a quantum leap in certain types of online experience.
And we believe that “virtual” and “augmented” reality will be important applications of these new types of image generation.
But we also believe that these computer generated experiences should be widely distributed and available to everyone, on the devices that they already have — the desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
And they should be available immediately — no downloads, no apps, no wait times, no need to buy new hardware.
The Lockheed example shows that virtual worlds can be incredibly effective even without a headset, and we believe that if we look beyond the hardware and focus on new ways of delivering the content, a whole new world of opportunities come into view.
If that sounds cool to you, feel free to say “hi!” — you can reach us at hello@rtobjects.com.
