• by Chase Martin , August 14, 2016

Virtual reality continues to gain momentum and advertising opportunities evolve.

With the immersive nature of VR, brands may have a better opportunity to design engaging and more interactive content. However, best results may come from re-imagining how to frame experiences, rather than adapting current practices to the new format.

The IoT Daily caught up with Dave Meeker, VP of Isobar U.S., about creating content for virtual reality.

Virtual reality breaks down into three distinct categories, which range on a scale between pure media and interactive experience, according to Meeker.

“With passive experiences, which is most 360 videos, it’s cool, but the experience is generally on rails with little freedom for the viewer,” Meeker told the IoT Daily.

“The second level is the Oculus kind of content, which is interactive, but it’s not room-scale.

“The third level is immersive, with room-scale, which lets the viewer move around and interact in physical space.”

In terms of creating the content, passive experiences are relatively accessible to video-specific teams and the fully immersive, interactive experiences require software development on top of the creative, Meeker said.

When creating content for these applications, Meeker said that at the ‘passive VR’ level, projects look like existing video production adapted to 360 degrees of view.

However, when moving to the more interactive experiences, the scope broadens from just video to requiring software development expertise, generally from a few developers. Room-scale interactive experiences require a full team of developers.

While there is a strong upside for the engagement of fully interactive experiences, the process of creating them is much more difficult, according to Meeker.

“Not only is it difficult to produce content, but then you go through the development process.

“We’re working on one app that I tested yesterday. It’s not optimized yet so it was dropping frames and something just felt off. It’s not something you can visibly see, but it just feels wrong to the viewer.”

Although this added complexity might seem daunting to agencies starting to enter the world of offering VR experiences to their clients, Meeker said the technical aspect will become less of a barrier moving forward.

“It’s not a matter of agencies needing to catch up with the technology; these experiences aren’t technical solutions,” he told the Daily.

“Agencies don’t need to get more technical. The tools used to create VR content will become easier to use.”