i3 - November/December 2016 - 24

But There Are Big Risks
to Getting It Wrong

Creating
VR Stories
Requires
a Unique
Perspective
"VR is a weird
industry," says Simon,
"because the people
who are making it
tend to either come
from games or
from film, and they
have very different
viewpoints and
priorities based on
which industry they
come from."
Filmmakers, for
example, are used
to having near-total
control over where the
audience is looking.
But in VR, a user

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

could look anywhere.
Videogame makers,
says Simon, may
have a better intuitive
feel for guiding a
user's attention in
this context.
In fact, VR is still
developing a shared
visual language for
how to communicate.
Simon points to early
movies, which simply
used a camera, fixed
on a stage.
"It took a couple
of decades for us to
develop the language
of film that we have
right now," he says.
"We're at that early
stage in VR. We're
still sort of figuring
out what tricks we can
invent and create and
standardize in order
to solve some of these
problems."

AWARENESS
IS STILL
SLOW
Despite
the buzz that
VR gets at
shows like
CES, VR
is far from
ubiquitous.
Matthews
points to a
Futuresource
study which
claimed at the
end of 2015
that only eight
percent
of consumers
had tried VR.
Hulu's Ben
Smith sees a
niche as well.
"VR is currently only
appealing to
the tech early
adopters,"
he says, "and
it will be a
challenge for
it to cross
over into
mainstream
common
usage."

Virtual Reality Can Bridge
Television with Other Devices
Brown says that Discovery "filmed the 2nd act of Isle
of Jaws in VR/360 and promoted on-air that it was
available to view on the Shark Week Facebook page.
It has more than 750,000 views - a huge success and
something that will inspire more cross-platform
VR programming."

VR is Expensive
- Be Sure You
Want to Do It
"It's important for marketers to realize that they
shouldn't just be doing VR
for the sake of VR," says
Mortensen. After all VR
is expensive to produce.
Brands need to know if
it makes sense for their
audience. Brown takes a
similar view. "Just because
you can shoot something
in VR does not mean you
should," he says.

Simon sees a future
of turnkey VR solutions for brands that
don't want to spend
resources building their
own custom content.
Sports, for instance,
could offer VR ad placements similar to those
on television. At that
point, he says, "it opens
the door to pretty much
every brand to at least
giving it a try." One thing
that brands should try
before VR, says Simon,
is 360 video for larger
audiences on Facebook
and YouTube. That way,
brands can "learn a lot of
things about the kinds of
content that works and
the content that doesn't
work and what your consumers are interested in
experiencing."
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

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While VR's ability to create intense
memories offers unprecedented
opportunities to connect emotionally
with viewers, bugs and glitches can
create an exceptionally bad experience.
Unfocused images or slow-moving
images could cause discomfort,
powerfully linking a brand with a bad memory.
"Instead of creating that happiness, you're creating
nausea and misery," says Mortensen, "and that's how
the person's going to remember that brand."
Regular TV commercials or YouTube pre-roll
ads typically don't give users motion sickness. VR,
however, increases that risk.

i3 - November/December 2016

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