What is virtual reality (VR)?
Virtual reality puts you somewhere else. A headset covers your eyes with a screen for each, tracks the movement of your head so the world shifts as you look around, and often tracks your hands or controllers so you can reach out and touch it. The result is presence: the brain's sense of actually being in a place, which no flat screen produces.
VR content comes in two main kinds. Rendered experiences are built in real-time 3D engines, the same technology behind video games, and let people move around and interact. 360-degree video is filmed with special camera rigs and lets people look in any direction from a fixed point. Both have their uses; only the first lets the audience walk.
Why it matters
Why VR matters
Presence is a powerful thing to sell with. Putting someone courtside, on a stage, in a hotel suite, inside a product or on a factory floor creates a memory closer to experience than to advertising. It is the opposite of a glance. For training, for travel and real estate, and for storytelling that asks for empathy, nothing else comes as close to being there.
The limit is reach. Headsets have found a loyal audience in gaming and fitness, but most people still do not own one, so VR works best for brands that can bring the audience to the headset rather than waiting for the headset to come to them.
In practice
How VR works in practice
- 01
A brand VR project starts with what the visitor will do and for how long, usually a few minutes. The world is then designed and built in a real-time engine, or filmed with a 360 rig, and tested for comfort: steady horizons, no movement the viewer did not choose and frame rates high enough to avoid motion sickness. Sound is designed spatially, because in VR it tells people where to look.
- 02
Delivery is planned around the audience. At events and in stores, staff run the headsets, clean them between visitors and manage the line. For audiences at home, the experience goes out through the headset makers' app stores, and a flat video version is cut for social so people without a headset can still see what they are missing.
Watch out
What people get wrong about VR
Making people sick. Camera movement that works on a screen, such as fast pans, sweeping crane moves and shaky handheld, can turn the stomach in a headset, and a nauseated visitor will not remember the brand fondly. The other mistake we see is building a long experience. Three focused minutes beat twenty wandering ones, especially when there is a line of people waiting their turn.
The third is forgetting the people who cannot or will not wear a headset: those whose glasses do not fit, those prone to motion sickness and those who simply do not want to. A strong VR activation gives them a way in too, such as a screen showing the wearer's view or a seated version of the experience.
