advertising – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

April 4, 2017

Vive’s New Promo Shows The World VR Could Make

With Vive’s anniversary coming up, HTC China has revealed a new advert for its VR headset, and it’s notable for focusing on practically every use of the tech outside of games.

Sure, entertainment gets a little time in the spotlight in the video below, but the promo is far more concerned with other use cases for VR. In its opening moments we see an elderly man travel across the globe to greet his family before two doctors meet up in VR to discuss work together. Later on a child uses VR to learn about the universe. Granted VR isn’t yet at the level the footage suggests, but it’s very much a clip of what HTC sees Vive doing for the world beyond the many games available today, and a good reminder of VR’s potential to impact every single one of us.

Tagged with: htc, htc vive

March 1, 2017

GDC 2017: Epic’s Tim Sweeney on What Unreal Engine VR Means for Non-gaming Industries

VR video games are some of the most immersive, visceral experiences to date. Travelling to fantastic worlds, going brain-to-rotting-noggin’ with zombie hordes and throwing coffee mugs at floating sentient CRTs has never felt so real. But games are just the start of where VR and AR are heading, and honestly, most likely will not be either platform’s primary function in the future.

Enhanced reality devices – especially AR — will be ubiquitous in another decade or so, and used in nearly every aspect of our lives and in nearly every industry, from automotive to medical care, education to neuroscience, engineering to shopping. We’re on the cusp of a technological evolution, and while games will be driving the early experiences, they won’t be the predominant use for very long.

Of course, all of the various applications, programs and tools will require a base engine for creation, and that’s where Epic Games – and specifically its Unreal Engine – comes in. We had a chance to meet with Epic’s CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney to get his take on where he thinks VR and AR are heading and what Unreal Engine VR means for the plethora of non-gaming industries.

“VR and augmented reality are going to be the most visually-demanding platforms ever,” says Sweeney. “Unreal Engine was brought up in the days of PCs with big monitors and console games on your television, and we’ve had kind of a step back from pushing visual fidelity on mobile platforms. When you have a screen that only takes up 20% of your field of view on a mobile device, you don’t want world-class, photorealistic, high-detail graphics because it’s hard to see all the little details. You want stylized imagery. But now we’ve gone to these VR platforms and AR, your brain expects you’re going to see realistic objects, and your brain is very sensitive to anything that’s wrong.

“The ways architects and automotive companies will use VR is really healthy for us for our engine direction. In a game, whenever the engine fell short of achieving realism one area we could always fake it with some stylization, but if you have to recreate a realistic object, you can’t cheat, you have to actually do the hard work.

“Creative applications like Oculus Medium, Tilt Brush and Ghost Paint are exposing artistry to computer users that’s much more visceral than ever before. It’s a somewhat unnatural experience to sit down in Photoshop or 3D Studio Max or even Unity or Unreal and build 3D objects with a mouse and keyboard because the actions you’re doing with your hands don’t map very clearly to the actual actions in the world. In VR, it’s you reaching out and doing things with your hands the exact same way it works in the real world, so anyone who has ever painted knows how to paint in VR, and that’s a really empowering phenomena, and completely different than human interaction in the past. Just like Minecraft enabled 50 million people to become 3D content creators, I think there will be hundreds of millions of computer content creators with augmented reality and VR makes that completely accessible to people.

“Because we’ve now made Unreal Engine ubiquitous — anybody can go to the website and download the full toolset and get started on projects without any commitment, without talking to any human and without any negotiation — a variety of companies are downloading it and using it and then talking to us and showing us their projects. They’re doing some amazing things.

“We’re already about two years into that revolution of adoption of Unreal Engine by these industrial companies, and we’re seeing them making real-time engines — and especially Unreal — a much-more pervasive part of their entire production and company pipelines.

“The automotive industries are leading adopters; they’re using real-time engine tech for everything from design visualization all the way up to dealer showrooms so you can configure a car photo-realistically and see exactly what all of the millions of permutations of custom options look like in a way that’s just not possible with physical inventory.

“Right now your Amazon shopping experience involves looking at a lot of low-resolution JPEGs of products. All of those models are going to be digital in the future; they’re going to be high-fidelity and you’ll be able to preview them in a web browser or in VR and AR. You’ll be able to scale them, scan your room and place them in your environment and see if the couch you’re looking at or the painting looks good before you buy it. And then you’ll be able to customize all of these products, because once you’re able to see all of the different options, customization will be much more ubiquitous than using some bizarre user interface on the web. Products will be much more dynamic in the future, and technology like 3D printing is going to make manufacturing much more flexible than it has in the past.

“On the professional side, I’ve been blown away with the amount of progress we’ve been able to make with the VR Unreal Editor. We exposed the full editor user interface as if you have this iPad that you can bring up at any time and bring up objects in a very intuitive way. I think it’s going to be a very empowering technology for professional content creation of all sorts. Car makers are going to be designing cars by walking around in empty rooms and tweaking virtual objects until they’re ready to build them. They’ll experience that with other designers and have product reviews and have multidisciplinary collaboration — it’s going to be awesome!”

Tagged with: automotive, GDC, shopping, Tim Sweeney, unreal engine 4

February 23, 2017

Virtually Drive Audi’s New Q5 Through Your Own Sandbox Creation

Many concept vehicles over the years have teased the idea of utilizing augmented reality in the windshields, glass dashboard panels, and even side windows. When it comes to VR, Faraday Future is one of the most recent that have flirted with the technology by using the platform to design their connected car.

Audi wants to use VR to give us a chance to make our childhood dreams a reality by allowing customers to test drive the new Audi Q5 on a virtual track they design in a sandbox.

Partnering with production group MediaMonks, Audi Norway is tapping into the spirit of our inner child by allowing us to bring our creations within a real life sandbox into a virtual space. The sandy track is then your playground as you drive their new car over the hills and pits you shaped with a collection of children’s tools.

“For many of us, playing with cars in the sandpit is a distant memory,” says Audi Norway’s manager of marketing Tommy Jensen, in a prepared statement “Let’s face it, the opportunity rarely presents itself once you pass a certain age. The Sandbox 2.0 is a state-of-the-art toy for kids and adults…for the Audi brand, this is a new way to demonstrate our products.”

Once you shape your sandbox however you want, cameras hit it with bursts of infrared light to measure 200,000 points so that it can accurately map every bump and dip in the box. The area is then recreated virtually and customers hop into a chair with steering wheel and pedals before they’re fitted with a VR headset and allowed to whip around the map.

“When you put on the headset you don’t just see the inside of an Audi Q5. This virtual world has real depth,” says MediaMonks’s creative director Tom Eriksen. “You can look around and explore behind stuff. It’s really exciting to watch as people experience this for the first time. To create a VR experience that is totally believable, it’s important that the driving environment also feels real. Not only the visual part but also the feel of the steering wheel and its feedback when you hit the sand.”

This is a pretty unique way to harness the power of VR to sell a product. The marriage of hands-on creativity and virtual space is a smart one that should get customers engaged, but it remains to be seen if it’ll be beneficial to Audi over time. It’s surely beneficial for the VR industry, however, showing another one of the many ways it can be used outside of the gaming ecosystem.

Tagged with: advertising, audi, Norway, sandbox, VR

February 23, 2017

Augmented Reality in Marketing and AR use cases

Industry experts have long known that Augmented Reality is a powerful marketing tool, while in more recent times the Pokémon Go boom has made everyone understand the huge business impact of the technology.
There have been many businesses that have ridden the wave exploiting PokeStop and Pokémon gyms in order to attract a greater number of customers, and getting some success.

Pokémon Go, to be honest, is not the world’s most powerful implementation of Augmented Reality, although in its simplicity it was able to achieve unprecedented success.
Application scenarios of Augmented Reality in marketing are numerous and require a dedicated study.

Augmented Reality for print products

Although the digital revolution has dramatically changed the way we use information, still a relevant piece of information is conveyed through paper, such as newspapers, magazines, catalogs, flyers, books, etc …

Despite having lost ground to digital, paper products are still a powerful means of communication and this is confirmed by the McKinsey Global Media Report 2015 which basically highlights two trends: the first concerns the maturity of the print media (+ 1.7% growth from 2014 to 2019); the second a steady growth of the digital (+ 9.5% in the same period).

This suggests that these two seemingly distant worlds, can live well together, and indeed they can also cooperate. In fact, according to research by Digimarc, 75% of consumers think that digital media is a complement to paper, rather than a replacement.

Marketers from all sectors can think of innovative ways for presenting their products and services, combining greater clarity of the offer to a greater customer engagement. It has been demonstrated, according to the claim made by Lisa Hu, that using Augmented Reality you can get a dwell time 2.5 times higher than that of traditional media (TV, radio and newspapers).

To date, cases of successful Augmented Reality implementations in this area relate to, among others, the creation of immersive catalogs, magazines and books with AR.

Augmented Reality for events and trade shows

The promotional environment par excellence, for many companies, is that of fairs and events in general. These are special occasions for companies to show off theirs strengths and to try to engage visitors in order to convert them into customers or at least into leads.

In this context, companies focus a lot on entertainment, giving visitors the opportunity to try the products and to make the time spent at the stands a memorable experience.

The use cases of marketing actions with the support of Augmented Reality in this area are diverse, ranging from brochures and catalogs with immersive 3D visualization of the product, to the organization of contests and gaming experiences to engage and amaze visitors giving them a concrete idea of the real potential of the product.

Augmented Reality for packaging

A sub-set of paper products, to which more and more companies turn their attention to design marketing actions with Augmented Reality, is packaging.
What better time to engage the customer and to provide additional information on the product except when she is face to face with the package?

There are interesting use cases of interactive packaging that put people in a position to activate additional content or mini-games that come to life from a bottle of a soft drink, rather than from the foil of the chips of a fast food and so on.
The result is an increase in brand reputation and customer loyalty, because when customers are faced with a similar product, they tend to pick the more exciting purchase experience.

Augmented Reality for in-store experiences

The natural ability of Augmented Reality to expand people’s vision makes it particularly suited to design in-store marketing experiences, allowing retail companies to offer additional layers of information to the visitors.

This category of use cases includes indoor navigation to guide people in a particular area of the store, maybe to locate special deals; the display of products and information that is not physically present in the stores because of space limitations; the possibility to sort or read the data on the origin, understand the production process, watch a promotional video, etc …
These experiences can be enriched by the gamification of the buying process with premium and retention mechanisms.

February 4, 2017

How 5 Companies Used 360-Degree Advertisements To Promote Their Brands

Growing up, my family and I loved watching the Super Bowl. This had nothing to do with football. Our reasoning was two-fold: 1.Sandwiches 2. Commercials.

On the first point: Sandwiches are the perfect food. They are an ideal category; the possibilities that can lie between bread are as infinite as stars in the sky. On the second point: Super Bowl commercials are the most creative and experimental of the year. Whether creating sex symbols or announcing new technology, these works get as much coverage as the game itself– and often leave a deeper cultural impact. Yet, as I’ve gotten older, I have been less and less wowed by traditional ads.

Enter 360 Video / VR. Suddenly, we have the ability to not only watch an advertisement — we can inhabit it. The risk-taking spirit of marketing is making a comeback, and VR is at the helm. With the big game tomorrow, here are some 360 marketing MVP’s to make you cheer.

Prius Redesigned CA Style | Toyota | 360 video

Company: VR Playhouse

This piece is a wonderful synergy between brand and content, as well as a primer in understanding your target audience. The usage of time-lapse gives movement to the video, and the music is hip — but not off-puttingly so. The stars of the film are sepia-filtered and styled like Instagram stars. They are young, hip millennials who are looking for a little eco-friendly adventure, and you are invited along for the ride.

360 Degree View of the Patrón Hacienda

Company: Firstborn

Fly through the Patrón Hacienda as a tiny agave-loving bumble bee. As you soar over farmlands and inside machinery, this 3-minute adventure highlights the beauty of the tequila-making process. Made in 2015, the mixture of CGI and 360 video was ahead of its time — however, without question it stands up to more recent experiences. There is an ease to this piece — the production values are high, and the sound is exquisitely mixed. ¡Salud!

McDonald’s Happy Goggles

Company: DDB

Proof that everyone really is happier in Sweden, in 2016 McDonald’s made a run of their iconic happy meal boxes that folded into VR headsets. The project, called “Happy Goggles,” was in celebration of the Swedish “Sportlov” recreational holiday. As such, the first game was an animated skiing-racing experience called “Se upp i backen,” which translates to “Watch out on the slopes.” Although the game of dodging obstacles and catching stars is simple, it is a perfect intro to VR for the Happy Meal demographic. (Fun fact: the piece also has the unique position of being the only VR experience ever endorsed by the Swedish alpine ski team!)

Expedia’s Virtual Flåm

Company: Verve Search

Clocking in at an robust 44 minutes, text overlays inform you of your destination as you travel along the Norwegian Flåm railway. The sights of mountains, glaciers and rivers are beautiful to behold along the steep trek — but moments of gliding through dark tunnels like a sprightly troll were a personal favorite. A popular anecdote of the early days of film was that audiences would jump out of the way as a train seemed to come at them through the screen. It would have been difficult to explain to them a future when you in fact are the train, but here we are.

Destination: Inspiration Virtual Reality Experience

Company: ReelFX VR and GSD&M

Many hotel chains are dipping a toe into the 360 space, but Hilton made a good call hiring VR-industry pros for their first experience. The optimistic narration may be typical of hotel marketing, but the different camera angles (especially some expert drone work) and activities happening in all directions make this an ad that wouldn’t be possible in any medium but VR. The Hilton hotel chain may be almost 100 years old, but VR is still new enough that watching this makes you feel like you’ve already begun your adventure.

Maggie Lane is a VR Writer/Producer based in Los Angeles. Tweet her sandwiches on Twitter and view her pictures of various sandwiches on Instagram.

Tagged with: advertising, brand

January 23, 2017

Sundance Attendees Saw A Hologram of ‘Mad Men’ Actor Jon Hamm

Back in 2012, the world was introduced to the idea of augmented reality by the way a hologram of the long deceased Hip Hop artist Tupac. While the idea was not quite a “hologram” as we understand them to be, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were certainly utilizing AR to perform alongside the CGI recreation. As reported by Hollywood Reporter, the Sundance Film Festival was home to what’s shaping up to be one of the first hologram performances there with actor Jon Hamm being transformed into a hologram for an experience based on one of the event’s feature films.

Marjorie Prime, the feature film that this AR experience was inspired by, has a premise that sounds like it fits right in with an episode of the British sci-fi anthology Black Mirror, which is available on Netflix. In the film, there’s a service that produces life-like holograms of deceased loved ones and a man named Jon (played by Tim Robbins) takes the opportunity to come face to face with his late father in law (played by Jon Hamm).

The demonstration is powered by 8i, a company that received $13.5 million toward its goal of realistic 3D human capture, Hamm’s character from the film will make an appearance at Sundance and can be interacted with using VR or mixed reality on mobile devices.

“It is amazing to experience the future in the here and now,” says Marjorie Prime producer Uri Singer in the report. “When we first started working on the movie, the script dictated that the holograms would be portrayed as a futuristic reality. Making an actual hologram, not only on film but one that can be experienced with VR/AR, attests to how present the future has become.”

And in case you haven’t seen it, Hamm does in fact star in one of the best episodes of Black Mirror — the White Christmas episode which itself includes some elements of mixed reality. The episode is on Netflix and highly recommended.

Tagged with: Jon Hamm, Marjorie Prime, sundance film festival, Uri Singer

November 19, 2016

The top 10 tech stars of the north

From an app that boosts declining high streets, to a platform where anyone can create an online radio station, these startups have been tipped for big things

The north’s digital economy is creating jobs at 10 times the rate of the region’s non-digital sectors, according to a recent report.

To celebrate and promote the emergence of this so-called digital powerhouse, Tech North on Thursday night held the grand final of its Northern Stars competition to uncover the region’s 10 brightest tech startups.

November 15, 2016

I Attended the Jaguar VR Car Launch and Press Events Will Never Be the Same

As this week is the 2016 International LA Autoshow and there will be numerous car launches and announcements, it comes as no surprise that Jaguar is launching a new car. This new car, the Jaguar I-Pace, is the technological and cultural successor to the company’s F-Pace SUV. The I-Pace is a completely redesigned vehicle from the ground up and features a fully electric power train and new modern design that accounts for being fully electric. The I-Pace Concept is essentially a direct competitor to Tesla’s Model X P90D with a dual motor design and 90 kWh battery that puts out an equivalent of about 400 Horsepower and 700 ft. lbs. of torque. What does any of this have to do with VR?

Because Jaguar decided to announce the new I-Pace electric SUV completely in VR using presenters, 3D models, diagrams, animations and designs completely in VR. The way Jaguar did it was through HTC Vive headsets placed at every table, with 6 people sitting at a table each with their own HTC Vive headset, headphones and single Vive controller.

To create this experience Jaguar partnered with the Imagination Agency with help from REWIND and technology partners HTC and Dell. HTC supplied the headsets and Dell supplied the Dell Precision 7900 workstations with NVIDIA GTX 1080s inside to power the experience built by REWIND for Jaguar, Imagination’s customer. The first thing they had us do during the launch was to put on our headsets. We could see all the other people at our table with avatars that looked like color-coded representations of people’s headsets.

This way you could see your table mates and then a mini slot car track showed up where each person at the table could play slot cars with each other until the launch itself began. This was semi-competitive and was a fun little mini-game and distraction until the main event began. At our table, it immediately sparked some conversation and interaction between people as their little Jaguar slot cars flew off the track.

Once that was over, a presenter who showed up by way of live local video feed got all our attention and I noticed that you could see all the people around you at all the other tables as well. Everyone’s ‘avatar’ of their headset was visible and could be individually identified by color and table. They did this for 66 people at the same time, which is a feat in of itself because we were all interconnected.

Eventually, the feed started and the presenter got everyone’s attention starting to talk about the journey of how Jaguar reached this point in their evolution, and introduced Jaguar’s famous designer to talk about designing the car. This included showing interactive sketches, wire meshes, battery packs, motors and other parts of the car that allowed you to fully interact with the objects as they talked about them. You could see the other people doing the same across the room all interacting with the same 3D models individually. The amazing part was how well all of the headsets were interconnected and how we could wave to two groups of people participating from the UK, sans the typical broadcast audio delay, everything was perfect and there was no noticeable lag, anywhere, at all.

Additionally, Jaguar had a finished prototype of the vehicle for users to look inside in VR, without ever having to see the car in person. Thankfully, they snuck a real-world version of the vehicle into the room while we were all sitting in VR. The overall design, implementation and explanation of everything about the Jaguar I-Pace was nearly perfectly executed in VR by Jaguar and Imagination. It gave me a sense of engagement and immersion with a product I never had before. So many people walked out of that experience sold on the vehicle’s attributes, design and performance even though they didn’t even know the price.

Jaguar did not talk about price, but they did say that this car will be available to consumers in the second half of 2018, just around the same time as many of their other competitors. OnePlus did the first VR launch to my knowledge with Google cardboard with a 360-degree video and Facebook did a semi-VR launch with the GearVR at MWC earlier this year. But Jaguar has once again raised the bar for VR launched with these HTC Vive interactive experiences. I really do not believe that product launches will ever be the same again. Jaguar says that the I-Pace Concept VR experience will also be available through Viveport “in due course.” Jaguar is inviting people to express their interest in the I-Pace finished vehicle based on the concept on their website.

Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or had provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Dell Technologies, NVIDIA and others cited this article. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column.

Tagged with: 2016, dell, GTX 1080, htc, I-Pace, Jaguar, JLR, LA Autoshow, Land Rover, launch, nvidia, Vive, VR, VR Launch

November 3, 2016

Twitch switches to new advertising model in move to curb ad blocking

Gaming-focused streaming service Twitch is adopting a new advertising approach that will "reduce the efficacy" of ad blockers while ensuring a broader reach and more consistent delivery for advertisers.

The post Twitch switches to new advertising model in move to curb ad blocking appeared first on Digital Trends.

September 14, 2016

VR Advertisement Platform Vertebrae Raises $10M Investment

Vertebrae, a virtual reality advertising platform that promises to bring ad supported monetization to VR publishers, today announced a $10 million series A fundraising.

Vertebrae’s platform, now out of stealth, is currently in private beta for use by content publishers such as entertainment studios, gaming companies, creative agencies, and brands that want to insert ads into their VR creations. The company didn’t specify who participated in the investment round.

Vertebrae aims to deliver VR ads to both interactive rendered spaces and 360 video, including custom VR mini-games, branded image backgrounds, and content sponsorship.

blair_witch_vr

Vertebrae worked recently with Lionsgate to create a VR ad experience for the September 16th premier of the film Blair Witch (2016), according to Vertebrae the experience was designed to build intrigue and promote awareness that then drives people to theaters to watch the full-length film. The 90 second immersive ad was served as a pre-roll ad to the VR game Sisters, a VR horror title.

The post VR Advertisement Platform Vertebrae Raises $10M Investment appeared first on Road to VR.