Friday is here again, but this time it begins with a Life In 360° that is very much all business. In a number of ways. Earlier in the week we reported on about Omnivirt, a 360 degree video and virtual reality (VR) advertising platform. Founded by former Google and YouTube employees the company has already received a lot of funding and is already working with a number of big players. Including, VRFocus reported at the time, Snapchat.
This last week however saw a 360 degree trailer for ABC’s Time After Time go live on the Yahoo, Bustle, and Google Doubleclick platforms.
Time After Time is based on the novel and movie of the same name in which famed novelist H.G. Wellsengages in a cat-and-mouse chase of the man he thought to be his friend but who just very well might be Victorian mass murderer Jack the Ripper. Wells uses his time machine of literary fame to follow Jack the Ripper (who has used the same) to New York City in the modern day. Here Wells finds a world even he could scarcely imagine, and as for Jack? He finds a world where even his exploits seem tame in comparison to some of the things going on around him. He might’ve found somewhere new to call home and begin a new – it’s up to Wells to stop him.
“These immersive experiences need to find an audience.” Says OmniVirt’s Chief Operating Officer Michael Rucker, “Its great to see marketers having the strategic foresight to think about a robust digital distribution strategy for their immersive content.”
Virtual reality (VR) advertising platform OmniVert today announced it has become the primary platform for brands looking to utilize 360 degree VR video inside the newly stock market floated SnapChat.
Universal Pictures, Netflix and Chick-Fil-A have used VR in their recent advertising campaigns, and used the OmniVirt platfrom to bring those campaigns into SnapChat. SnapChat announced it’s first 360-degree video campaign with Sony pictures at the end of last year and since then, several other advertisers have followed suit onto the popular picture messaging service.
“Based on our customers’ feedback, advertisers are required to provide Snapchat a 360° experience that works on the web,” notes Brad Phaisan, CEO of OmniVirt. “Given our robust mobile web 360° VR Video player, we have quickly become the easiest way to get your VR campaign up and running inside of Snapchat.”
In addition, OmniVirt have also been powering 360-degree video adverts for Twitter, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, AOL and others. As we’ve seen before, VR advertising is on the rise, between Adobe’s new advertising systems, Verve and Digital Domain joining to create new VR advertising content and Chevrolet using augmented reality for their new campaign, this is a large growth area.
VRFocus will continue to bring you news on developments regarding VR advertising.
An industry group and individual vendors are working to fix the problem of incompatibility across multiple virtual reality content hosting, distribution and advertising platforms.
Currently, advertisers, publishers and brands often have to create native applications for each of the platforms to distribute and monetize content to as large audience as possible.
Advertisers hope to be able to run the same ad everywhere easily. That will not only help advertisers reach a new audience, but will also increase revenues for game developers and other content providers.
While publishers, brands and advertisers wait for WebVR and Khronos standards to materialize, vendors such as VUSR and OmniVirt are already offering their own solution.
This month, the group called on advertising industry players to join an initiative that will help deal with fragmentation issues across the different virtual reality platforms.
They hope to come up with standards where APIs will track headsets, controllers and other objects and then integrate all of the devices into a virtual reality runtime, said the announcement.
(Image courtesy Kronos Group.)
“Open standards which allow developers to more easily create compelling, cross platform experiences will help bring the magic of VR to everyone,” Mike Jazayeri, director of product management at Google VR, said in the announcement. “We look forward to working with our industry colleagues on this initiative.”
WebVR
WebVR is currently experimenting a JavaScript API which will enable compatibility and visibility of content across Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, or Google Cardboard platforms on all web browsers. In short, publishers’ virtual reality content, once published on any virtual reality platform, could also be accessible through all web browsers.
For advertisers and publishers, WebVR is not yet ready for use right now and is in its early days according to a recent announcement, although there is a great progress with experimenting WebVR 1.0 on Firefox Nightly, which was expected to leave beta by end of this year.
The Chrome team has also announced that WebVR is available as an Origin Trial in Chrome 56 Beta for Android and Oculus has launched the Carmel browser preview — its virtual reality browser — as Samsung continues to improve implementation for WebVR on its browser. Microsoft has also announced that it has started to work on supporting WebVR for Edge, the new browser for Windows 10.
When ready, WebVR will also help developers avoid developing applications for each of the virtual reality application and users can save more storage space.
WebVR is currently available for experimentation on Firefox Nightly builds, as experimental builds for Chromium, and in the Samsung Internet Browser for Gear VR. WebVR-enabled builds are available for download at the WebVR web page. Users can also add WebVR to their mobile site by using the WebVR Polyfill to provide support for Cardboard mobile devices such as iOS and Android.
For now, you can download WebVR samples to test if your browser supports the WebVR API.
VUSR
(Image courtesy VUSR.)
The New YorkTimes-based VUSR, which is now supported on the NYT VR app for Daydream, enables publishers to publish virtual reality content and 360-degree videos across Oculus, Google Cardboard, Vive, Daydream, PlayStation and Gear VR,.
Publishers using the platform can monetize content through sponsorships, in-app purchases, advertising and video sales.
OminiVirt
OmniVirt is another virtual reality and 360 degree video advertising and distribution platform which supports both multiple VR platforms as well as ad networks.
Users can can load virtual experiences right from a website and experience them with their Google Cardboard headsets, without having to download a separate app. Although they currently focus on mobile VR, support for other platforms in the works.
Michael Rucker
“The next phase of our development is focused on WebVR so that we can power experiences across all platforms or headsets like Oculus, Daydream, PSVR, and Vive,” OmniVirt co-founder and COO Michael Rucker told Hypergrid Business. “This will all be coming early next year.”
OmniVirt also helps companies measure user engagement.
“Our ad units have seen a ten-fold uplift in interaction rates relative to standard units that would typically fill that same inventory,” said Rucker. “And those users that interact have spent over a minute of dwell time with this immersive content.”
The company is working with brands such as The New York Times, AOL, Wall Street Journal, Time and Twitter to power 360-degree video playback.
