Virtual reality is an incredibly powerful technology that you can start using right now to help improve your business or promote your brand. However, before you invest in VR, there are a couple of key things you’ll want to keep in mind to help make sure that investment pays off.
First, understand why you’re choosing to use VR in the first place. Number two, before you actually start building anything, know what your distribution strategy looks like, and number three, go find some expert help! It will make your life a lot simpler.
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Let’s dive into each one of these in a bit more detail.
First and foremost, virtual reality has the ability to create a sense of presence in the viewer. So if you want to take your customers or your employees feel as if they are in a very particular place or inside of a very particular environment, virtual reality is a great technology for that use. VR pioneer Chris Milk even calls the technology an ‘empathy machine’. Let’s say you’re the head of an HR department and you’re looking for a way to improve your team’s interpersonal skills or you want to make your nursing staff a bit more empathetic towards your patients? VR is incredibly powerful in the sense that it can actually create empathy in the viewer.
Another fantastic benefit of using VR is simply as a visualization tool. Lets say you’re designing new retail stores for the Northwest region of your company. Wouldn’t it be great to get some real customer feedback on what that retail store feels like before you actually build it!? A great use case for VR. And these are just a couple the benefits that come along with using this technology, but again before you invest make sure you have a clear understanding of why you’re choosing to use VR and it will help ensure that your experience is out of this world.
You’re also going to want to take some time to lay out a clear distribution strategy for how you plan to share the project once it’s complete. Let’s say that you want to train new employees on how to drive a forklift, a great use case for VR. Well, are those employees coming to you, or to you need to ship the headsets to them? Or maybe you need to put six wireless headsets in a box, package them up and ship and them to different distribution centers all across the globe. Understanding that distribution strategy ahead of time is going to help determine what type of hardware you need to invest in or what software platform is going to make for the best experience for your particular use case. This can have a huge effect on the actual development of your project. So before you start building, make sure you understand how you’re gonna share that experience and where is it going to live once it’s complete.
If you are thinking about investing in virtual reality, we highly recommend you find experts to help you along the way. Now I’m not saying don’t experiment. Hell, I encourage it! Go out there, get a headset, buy a laptop and start figuring out how this technology works. However, VR experiences can be pretty expensive and are super complex to develop properly. So if you are going to invest in a project, you can save a ton of time, money and hassle by working with a professional. There’s a ton of great firms out there and freelance talent that has been working in this space for years.
As a parting thought, VR gets talked about a lot of times through the lens of a technology. I mentioned it before in that sense. However, I believe that it is just as much about the art and creative in the experience, as much as it is about technically executing it properly. So if you are going to invest and you do want to create some amazing VR experiences, make sure you consider it as an art form just as much as a technical execution. This will make sure your experience is engaging, beautiful, comfortable and rememberable for your audience.
Stay hungry out there!
