It’s a platform world today, and VR is one of the great, emerging opportunities that brands have to reach consumers in unique ways. Our clients in health and pharma will benefit from long-form and interactive video opportunities, as well as expanded reach with younger demographics. -Andrea Palmer, Publicis Health Media (PHM)
The Future Of Virtual Reality (VR)
You might think you’ve experienced VR, and you might have been pretty impressed. Particularly if you’re a gamer, there are some great experiences to be had out there (or rather, in there) today.
But over the next few years, in VR, as in all fields of technology, we’re going to see things that make what is cutting-edge today look like Space Invaders. And although the games will be amazing, the effects of this transformation will be far broader, touching on our work, education, and social lives.
Today’s most popular VR applications involve taking total control of a user’s senses (sight and hearing, particularly) to create a totally immersive experience that places the user in a fully virtual environment that feels pretty realistic.
Climb up something high and look down, and you’re likely to get a sense of vertigo. If you see an object moving quickly towards your head, you’ll feel an urge to duck out of the way.
Very soon, VR creators will extend this sensory hijacking to our other faculties – for example, touch and smell – to deepen that sense of immersion. At the same time, the devices we use to visit these virtual worlds will become cheaper and lighter, removing the friction that can currently be a barrier.
I believe extended reality (XR) – a term that covers virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) – will be one of the most transformative tech trends of the next five years. It will be enabled and augmented by other tech trends, including super-fast networking, that will let us experience VR as a cloud service just like we currently consume music and movies. And artificial intelligence (AI) will provide us with more personalized virtual worlds to explore, even giving us realistic virtual characters to share our experiences with.
VR is already making great inroads into education, with a large number of startups and established companies offering packaged experiences and services aimed at schools. Engage’s platform is used by the likes of Facebook, HTC, and the European Commission to enable remote learning. And one study published in 2019 found that medical students trained using VR were able to carry out certain procedures quicker and more accurately than peers trained using traditional methods.
These new methods of teaching and learning will become increasingly effective as new technologies emerge. One that is likely to make waves is the Teslasuit, which uses a full-body suit to offer haptic feedback, enhancing the immersion through the sense of touch. It also offers an array of biometric sensors enabling the user’s heartbeat, perspiration, and other stress indicators to be measured. The suit is already used in NASA astronaut training, but its potential uses are unlimited.
For training, it could be used to safely simulate any number of hazardous or stressful conditions and monitor the way we respond to them. For example, Walmart has used it to train retail staff to work in Black Friday situations, instructing them on how to best to operate in busy shop environments with long queues of customers.
As well as training us for dangerous situations, it will also drastically reduce the financial risks involved with letting students and inexperienced recruits loose with expensive tools and machinery in any industry.
VR in industry and work
The pandemic has changed many things about the way we work, including the wholesale shift to home working for large numbers of employees. This brings challenges, including the need to retain an environment that fosters cooperative activity and the building of company culture. Solutions involving VR are quickly emerging to help tackle these.
Spatial, which creates a tool best described as a VR version of Zoom, reported a 1,000% increase in the use of its platform since March 2020. In total, the value of the market for VR business equipment is forecast to grow from $829 million in 2018 to $4.26 billion by 2023, according to research by ARtillery Intelligence.
Communication giant Ericsson (which has provided Oculus VR headsets to employees working from home during the pandemic for VR meetings) has talked about creating the “Internet of Senses.” This involves developing projects involving simulating touch, taste and smell, and sensations such as hot or cold. It predicts that by 2030, we will be able to enter digital environments that appear completely real to all of our five senses simultaneously.
Article source:Forbes
Will Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) Be Valuable for Real Estate Agents?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot about augmented reality and virtual reality. Both of these technologies show plenty of promise for the real estate industry. How would your selling process be different if a client could experience an immersive, 3D walkthrough? What about if people could use an augmented reality application to see how their existing furniture would look in an empty home during an open house? Those are just the beginning of the possibilities available through AR and VR.
What Are the Pros and Cons of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?
Augmented reality is an affordable technology that is already available to everyone with a smartphone. Shopping apps like the Amazon app already utilize AR technology to give customers a glimpse of how a product would look in a room or sitting on a table. The primary downside of AR is that, until there is an affordable consumer product that is widely adopted, there won’t be many immersive AR experiences. While numerous companies have attempted to launch something specifically for the real estate industry, nothing has taken off yet.
Virtual reality is catching on, as there are numerous affordable headsets hitting the market and some consumers have media, games and electronics that require these devices to work properly. As consumers continue to flock to VR, it will also become more accessible for real estate agents. One of the primary downsides is that VR does require a specialized headset, like the Oculus Go, to offer the highest quality experience.
Future AR and VR Applications for Selling Homes
– Homes with professional photographs have a higher perceived value. What about homes with a virtual walkthrough or 3D showcase? That boosts the perceived value even higher.
– Hosting virtual open houses when the owner is still living in the home is simple with virtual reality. All you need to do is have a variety of VR headsets, and you’re ready to host at your office or another location!
– Having a virtual reality “theater” in your office so that anyone stopping by can instantly see homes in a unique VR environment.
Over 70% of millennials are excited about applications of VR and AR, and as millennial homebuyers start searching the market for their first homes, you want a portion of that business.
Article source:Homeland
What are the Real Benefits of a Virtual Tour for The Tourism Industry?
Creating emotion
As travelling for a holiday is supposed to be a pleasurable activity, people in charge of travel destinations and tourist establishments must help future travellers dream of their next vacation.
Getting people to discover a city or a tourist attraction, using a high-quality virtual tour, helps convey a place’s atmosphere or a facility highlight its various benefits. A visitor’s first impressions, delivered by the tour within the comfort of their home, will generate various emotions. If these emotions are positive, the person is more likely to make a booking for their next holiday.
An entire tourist guide industry has witnessed strong growth in the past decades, promoters in the tourism sector often finding it difficult to share the beauty of their destinations, sites or tourist facilities efficiently, in order to ensure their popularity. With the virtual tour, it has now become much easier for a hotel manager to promote the beautiful new spa in his hotel, or a museum director to showcase a new upcoming exhibition.
Help plan
Most people plan their holidays beforehand, and the 360 virtual tour truly provides added value in this context.
As far as destinations are concerned, future visitors can gain a good grasp of a place and of its most interesting attractions, thereby helping them plan their visits. This helps tourists based in one place, but wanting to discover its surroundings, and is a necessity for people travelling throughout an entire region, having to book accommodation in various locations. Combined with a booking system, a virtual tour helps people book well in advance, making it easier for professionals in the tourism sector to plan their upcoming activity level.
The presentation of a destination’s accommodation offer is enriched using a virtual tour, making it possible for example for a hotel manager to showcase various aspects of his hotel (restaurant, spa, business centre, …). In the same way, hotels may use the virtual tour to explain usage of their facilities, helping guests discover the features in an interactive and natural manner. People wanting to make a booking will therefore have a better idea of an establishment, thereby reducing the time spent during the booking process. Lastly, a good quality virtual tour serves as a guarantee for guests, allowing them to explore an establishment and its surroundings before booking. This helps avoid traps such as the hotel with a view on the local landfill, or worse…
Impossible locations
Access to some valuable tourist locations is sometimes restricted due to their popularity or for security reasons.
In some cases, this involves protecting monuments or natural sites from mass tourism, in order to maintain such places for future generations. This is for example the case of the Grotte de Lascaux, in which the prehistorical wall paintings were starting to decay with the visitors’ breathing, resulting in the authorities opening a replica of the cave next to it.
Using virtual tours helps keep visits to such locations “open”, while protecting them from tourist presence.
Other interesting places may be difficult to reach or dangerous. As most people aren’t Mike Horn or Bear Grylls, visiting such locations is made possible using a virtual tour.
Article source:Klapty
10 Marketing Goals You Can Achieve with Virtual Tours for your Property
As markets become more competitive, marketing strategies become increasingly diversified. No modern marketing professional is tasked with simply achieving a single goal. Instead, the strategy is likely built on a variety of layered objectives, all ultimately driving towards growth and success in multiple ways.
Setting goals is vital in any modern marketing department, regardless of industry. According to CoSchedule, goal-setting marketers are 376% more likely to report success. But what happens once those goals are set?
The focus turns to execution. And when it comes to that execution, it’s vital to find tactics that serve to accomplish not one, but multiple marketing goals. Enter virtual tours.
With a rich history reaching back almost 30 years, 360 virtual experiences are far more than visual gadgets. They become crucial delivery mechanisms for some of your most important promotional and educational marketing messages. More specifically, the right virtual tour software can help you achieve these 10 common marketing goals.
1) Increase Brand Awareness
A core marketing goal, increasing brand awareness is simply about making sure that your target audience knows who you are. To accomplish that goal, visuals are absolutely vital. And there might not be a better visual to accomplish it than a virtual tour.
Add virtual experiences into your communications to increase brand awareness, and you naturally work towards this goal. That’s because these experiences are by nature engaging, allowing your audience to immerse themselves into your space. They’ll get a much better idea of who you are, and what you stand for, than they would with a few words, a picture, or a simple graphic.
2) Build a Competitive Advantage
This marketing goal comes in many shapes. You might frame it as standing out from your competition, or in more absolute terms as increasing market share. It might even be the closely-related brand positioning that places you in context with your closest competitors.
Ask yourself a few questions:
. How many of those competitors have a 360 virtual experience like yours?
. How many of the ones that do leverage it in a way that convinces and engages your audience?
. Do they use it to highlight their physical space only, or also the ways in which they’re unique?
. Do they tell a story about their brand through their digital map and tour?
Chances are that you will not be able to answer yes to all of these questions for any of your competitors. That, in turn, opens the possibility to build a competitive advantage, simply by creating a virtual tour that calls out your brand positioning in a unique, visual, engaging way.
3) Improve Brand Reputation
Your brand is, above all, what your audience perceives you to be. Through strategic branding, you can seek to influence these perceptions, impacting not just competitive positioning but also overall brand reputation. The more your perceived brand lines up with your intended one, the more likely you’ll be to drive audience trust, conversions, and sales.
A virtual tour can, and should, play a core role in improving that reputation. It helps you build your brand, employer or otherwise. How that happens depends on your industry:
. In higher education, a virtual tour might help you show that your urban campus still offers plenty of green space.
. In hospitality, your virtual tour can show off your leisure spaces, from your pool to your conference area.
. In logistics, the same type of tour can showcase the warehouse space you have available along with its efficiency planning.
Of course, these are just a few of countless examples. The right virtual experience can specifically target common perceptions and misconceptions, setting the record straight.
4) Increase Audience Engagement
This one is a natural fit. You need audience engagement because it gives you the time and space to make your pitch that your business, product, or service is the right match for your audience. Virtual tour software, meanwhile, gives you a natural playground for building that engagement.
That’s because this is an interactive medium at its core. Your audience will turn from passive viewers to active participants, choosing to experience your space at their own pace. Supplemental media, like embedded videos or narration, further enhance these feelings of immersion to build your audience engagement rates.
5) Enter a New Market
It’s an age-old marketing problem: how do you unlock a new market, with audiences not yet familiar with your brand? It might be starting to recruit out-of-state students or talent, or simply trying to get customers to understand your brand and the pillars on which it’s built.
A virtual tour, of course, is far from the only mechanism you should use to accomplish this goal. But, leveraged the right way, it can play a significant role. It’s a low-investment way for your audience to familiarize themselves with your brand and physical space. Without needing to travel, they can envision themselves on your premises. The sales pitch that follows becomes much easier as a result.
6) Optimize Lead Conversions
Generating quality leads is the top priority of most marketers today. Once you get the contact information of interested members of your target audience into your database, you can build targeted and more relevant follow-ups specifically designed to drive sales conversions and revenue.
But you need to give them something that feels worth giving up their contact information for. On the right platform, your digital tour can become one such lead magnet. Strategically embedded contact forms prompt your visitors to provide their information for more in-depth content in return, naturally integrated into their 360 virtual experience.
7) Increase Physical Visits
It might sound counterintuitive. But if your business relies on physical visits from prospective clients, students, or customers to close the deal, a virtual tour can actually help to accomplish it.
In higher education, for instance, virtual tours have actually been shown to increase physical campus visits. That’s because they offer a taste of the ‘real deal’, prompting the audience to more easily envision themselves in the space. The decision to take the physical trip becomes much easier to make and execute as a result.
8) Increase Sales and/or Revenue
It’s a natural follow-up to the above, but still worth highlighting on its own. Almost no modern marketing strategy can be called a success without a specific emphasis on driving revenue. Your virtual tour, as you might imagine at this point, can help you accomplish that marketing goal as well.
The reason is simple: once your audience has familiarized themselves with your space, which ideally tells your story, they’ll feel more closely connected to your brand. They’re a part of the community now. The decision to close the deal and become your customer becomes more natural, requiring less convincing in the process.
9) Increase Customer Loyalty
Don’t limit your virtual experiences to your prospective clients or customers. Your current clients can benefit from it just as much. If your goal is to build customer loyalty, increase student retention, or decrease churn, your virtual tour can help in a few core ways:
. Provide premier access, perhaps even to spaces your current customers are not (yet) familiar with.
. Learn about new facts, such as sustainability on your campus or customer benefits shown through the tour.
. Build interaction possibilities, allowing customers to provide suggestions for future improvements of both the tour and the physical space itself.
And of course, it also comes back to engagement. Offering your customers a way to engage with your brand beyond just buying more products can help keep your business top of mind for them, which will pay off when the next purchasing decision comes.
10) Improve ROI
Finally, it’s important to realize that all the above benefits are possible without a major budget expenditure. In other words, the returns tend to far outpace the initial investment, a helpful fact for any marketer whose goal is to improve and optimize their marketing ROI.
Virtual tours can build engagement, awareness, brand positioning and reputation, and sales. But they do it without the six digit investment that tackling these goals individually would require. Instead, it’s a single platform, with benefits stretching in almost all possible marketing directions.
Article source:VirtuaI 360 Tours
10 Ways Virtual Reality Will Impact The Future Of Advertising
Virtual reality is not a new technology, but it has steadily gained momentum over the last few years. The size of the VR market is expected to grow exponentially by 2024, and recent advances in the world of gaming have helped it make its way into more people’s homes.
However, fun and games aren’t all that VR offers. Advertisers, for instance, have recognized VR’s unique potential to facilitate immersive experiences. With the right marketing push, a company can use it to connect with consumers on even deeper levels.
Here, nine contributors to Forbes Agency Council explore different ways that they believe VR will impact the advertising market in coming years.
1. Virtual ‘Experiencing’ Of Products
I think we’ll see enhancements to interactivity in advertising, the same way the internet allows consumers to interact directly with favorite products and brands through web apps and social posting. The ways VR headsets and controllers simulate interactions in the real world (i.e., grabbing objects, walking, etc.) will offer something tactile with the power of the internet: virtually “experiencing” products. – Megan Devine, d.trio marketing group
2. Higher Conversion Rates Driven By Video
Interactive VR advertisements that allow customers to engage with different products or destinations would create a higher conversion rate. Imagine being served a hotel advertisement from the Maldives, where you feel as if you are actually at the resort on vacation, versus seeing a static picture. Video ads now perform better than images; VR will be the next natural step. – Blake George, BMG Media Co.
3. Improved Customer Experience And Service
VR creates an opportunity for enhanced experiences in advertising and can reduce the barriers businesses face in persuading prospective customers to use their product or service. While VR is more suited to certain subject matters, such as retail, as it allows customers to see products at their real size and scale, VR also offers opportunities to customer services, such as Cadillac creating virtual dealerships. – Katie Schibler Conn, KSA Marketing
4. Multiple Mobile Marketing Applications
VR will be applied to all aspects of mobile marketing. As more brands are getting in front of younger generations on social media platforms that support augmented reality, they’ll want to drive engagement and impressions in many different contexts. AR will be the one that sticks the longest and is most memorable. – Stefan Katanic, Veza Digital
5. A Substitute For In-Person Interactions
Covid-19 will change travel and trade shows, making VR an important substitute for previously in-person interactions. In addition to helping to cut down on costs (shipping, travel and otherwise), it can positively shape customers’ perceptions of your organization as forward-thinking, green-conscious and tech-savvy. – Michelle Abdow, Market Mentors, LLC
6. More In-Game Or In-App Advertising
For VR, I would expect to see a lot more in-game or in-app advertising. The larger area that I believe will expand for advertising is AR, where consumers wear glasses or headsets that allow them to have a digital overlay on the real world. There are countless opportunities for companies with physical locations to become part of the experience with paid advertising. – Brian Meert, AdvertiseMint
7. The Enablement Of Product Training For Buyers
Through VR, buyers can not only try out products, but also receive training on them. Vendors can simulate real-life applications, including physical feedback in some cases. This helps the buyer visualize the product in action, and it cuts major costs in shipping as well as costly demo equipment. – Wendy Covey, TREW Marketing
8. In-Experience Immersion And Engagement Tracking
VR will have a massive impact on the advertising industry, given the range of tools developers and designers will have to work with to implement creative strategies around the ads. New KPI metrics will be established, as advertisers will focus more on tracking immersion and in-experience engagement. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC
9. Online Events Taken To The Next Level
VR technology has a lot of potential to take online events to the next level. We expect to see online events and communities flourish long after the pandemic. While the application of VR for online events is still in its early stages, we already see promising online tools that can integrate avatars and host virtual exhibits, happy hours and networking opportunities. – Alana Sandel, Marketing For Wellness
10. Long-Form And Interactive Video Opportunities
Article source:Forbes
