How to start your VR pop-up store
Pop-up stores are an amazing way to connect with your audience, meet up with potential partners and showcase projects you’re working on. Especially when it comes to VR, pop-up stores offer the unique opportunity to introduce people to this new medium and let them try out room-scale virtual reality projects. If you’re thinking about opening up your own VR pop-up store, here are five learnings from my side.
Last week, we opened the doors to our second annual VR pop-up store in Berlin: a whole week of VR showcases, storytelling and tech workshops, stand-up panels and social hours (full program here).
WHO WE ARE
We are Vragments, a Berlin-based virtual reality studio. We produce VR projects in collaboration with newsrooms and we are building a tool called Fader that allows users to create their own 360 stories easily and fast.
The original idea behind the pop-up store was to open up a space where people can meet and experience various VR projects. Our goal was to offer a platform for networking with like-minded VR enthusiasts but also to introduce this new medium to people who have never even heard of VR (yes, they still exist). Last year, we opened up our first VR pop-up store and combined that with a Hackathon and our 2016 VR Conference for Journalism and Documentary (this year’s conference was on Friday, September 22, in Berlin).
Here are five learnings from planning our own VR pop-up store.
FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBER
- LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The venue plays an important role in the success of your pop-up store, especially if you want to attract different kinds of people with various backgrounds. Thanks to Joaquin Alvarado and late 1990s Kreuzberg resident Trey Bundy, we found the perfect spot in the heart of beautiful Berlin, Kreuzberg. This location gave us the opportunity to welcome the coincidental walk-ins with no previous experience with VR technology. It also enabled us to invite potential partners and fellow VR enthusiasts because the store was easy to find and well connected to public transportation.
Choosing a venue also requires soft skills: Make sure that the vibe of the location matches your pop-up store’s vibes. Do you need to invite potential investors? Make sure that you have a place ready for meetings. Your store needs to look like it’s ready to scale. Are you planning a launch party for your product? Don’t under- or overestimate the size of the space. Depending on what you’re planning and the vibe you’re trying to send, the venue has to match that exact message.
2. CREATE HIGHLIGHTS FOR YOUR DAYS AHEAD
It’s not enough to open up a pop-up store and then expect it to be a success (unless you’re Zoella, then it might work). Your days at the venue can be brutally long, and if you just wait/hope/pray for people to show up, chances are, you’ll be disappointed by the end of each day.
Instead, think about activities around your VR pop-up store. Last year, we organized a VR hackathon in collaboration with a nearby media design college. The students gathered around the store afterwards and celebrated their VR projects. Also, we synchronized the pop-up with a VR journalism conference on the last day as a highlight. It worked. People showed up to specific events, sometimes more than once.
This year, we decided to offer mini-workshops throughout the week for people who are interested in different VR topics. For instance, we offered an A-Frame and Unity workshop for storytellers and a rapid prototyping workshop for journalists to experiment with new VR concepts.
Also, we organized a stand-up panel on VR and ethics in journalism. We asked two experts, Euronews’ Thomas Seymat and NowHere Media’s Catarina Gomes, to speak about the topic, and everyone else was invited to chime in.
3. THINK OF THE POP-UP AS A JOURNEY
I think our store worked well because we were not trying to sell anything. We truly wanted to make VR technology accessible to people and we wanted them to experience this new medium. It was a space for discussion and experience, a place of wonder and discovery. We gave out drinks and snacks and invited everyone to stay. People started sitting down, observing others who were experiencing VR projects. It was magical.
So, for people who come into your pop-up store, think of different stations as representing different VR experiences. We had a three-step approach:
- Explain who we are and give an overview of our work and what we are doing here.
- Show visitors our different VR gear and let them experience at least one 360 and one CGI-based experience.
- If they are still interested (most of them were), invite them to one of the events, socialize with them and show them even more VR work (thanks to Google, we were able to give out Cardboards at the end of people’s stay).
That way, visitors stayed in the store for a longer period of time, which gave us the chance to get to know them and their work. Most of the guests were journalists, photographers, directors, engineers or students.
4. FIND THE RIGHT PARTNERS
Needless to say, we could not have done this on our own! We had partners who sponsored some of the events (e.g., we offered our workshop in collaboration with Netzwerk Medien-trainer). Also, we partnered with amazing colleagues from NowHere Media, Euronews and Deutsche Welle who also showcased their 360 work. And on Friday, the Mediadesign Hochschule took over the store and presented their own VR projects.
All these different VR experiences upgraded the program of our store. We were lucky to find partners willing to contribute to the space. Actually, collaborating with partners on a VR pop-up store is a reminder that this is a group effort to showcase VR experiences. Not everyone has the necessary VR equipment at home, so offering Oculus and Vive experiences at a pop-up store is an effective way to introduce them.
5. SPARK VR CONVERSATIONS
The last learning is a quick one. Again, since VR is still new to many, we were able to get rapid feedback from viewers. It was powerful to watch their reactions and listen to them talk about VR’s impact. Pop-up stores should be about sparking conversations, understanding viewers’ reactions and discussing what VR can do in the future.
If you’ve organized a VR pop-up store, let us know about your findings. If you’re planning to open one, let us know if you have any questions. Either way, VR is still in its early phases and, right now, the producers need feedback from viewers more than ever. Let’s create spaces where this can happen in a friendly, non-profit-driven way, so we can really enhance storytelling techniques and understand what works and what doesn’t.
About the author: Linda Rath-Wiggins, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Vragments, a Berlin-based VR startup that creates VR experiences in collaboration with newsrooms (e.g., this German VR example with Deutschlandradio Kultur). Vragments is developing a VR tool called Fader that allows users to create and publish VR stories easily and fast. You can already sign up to try out the prototype. Vragments produced a first Fader use case in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
