• by Chase Martin , October 30, 2016

There have been differing perspectives on which tier of virtual reality agencies should pursue and at least one believes strongly in the middle-ground approach.

The IoT Daily visited the Boston-area office of Cramer and spent some time with Lindsay Nie and Greg Jones to hear about how their agency uses virtual reality for clients. They said that while fully immersive, room-scale VR provides the best experience, in practice, the approach is difficult to scale.

“Unless you have a physical space where you have an installation and you’re grabbing one person for 15 or 20 minutes and you’re giving them an exclusive, high-end experience, that’s the only way that something like that would ever work,” Greg Jones, senior strategist at Cramer, told the IoT Daily.

Instead, Jones said their focus has been on mid-level mobile-based VR systems that are immersive enough to establish an experience, but have more flexibility than tied-down PC-based VR systems like Oculus’ Rift and HTC’s Vive.

“The great thing is that because it’s all app-based, you just use your own phone. So we just give people the URL, they go download the app and then can view the content themselves,” Jones said.

The general perspective of Cramer seems to be that the value that mobile-based VR systems can drive for mobility, scalability and quick impact for brand experiences is greater than higher-end fully immersive VR systems.

Further developments in mobile-based VR systems, such as adding wireless controllers like Google’s recently released Daydream View, will continue to increase that value for mobile-based VR systems, according to Lindsay Nie, senior director and head of technology at the 30-year-old agency.

“For a lot of our clients, the things that we do are activation-based, tradeshow-based and the best experience you’re going to get is on a Gear VR in a swivel chair,” Nie told the Daily.

“As this middle level evolves a little bit more and there’s more interactivity that you can do without needing all of the wires and processing power to use your hands, there’s so much you can do with that that it almost doesn’t even really make sense to use anything more.”