We talk everyday with businesses who are fascinated by the possibilities of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) in Marketing. Here are some of the biggest takeaways and some guidance on what to consider when using VR best for your own marketing strategy:
#1 VR (and AR) is here to stay and no short term trend
Every company has plans to use VR and AR as new marketing channel. There is an interesting study in Germany highlighting that more than 70% of all business in Germany plan to leverage AR and VR
#2 Reaching a big audience and no. of devices is priority number one
When deciding to spend budget on VR/AR companies are still at experimental stage. Only few have dedicated budgets yet as they have doubts on how big the audience of VR/AR users is already. An new technology helping with this approach is WebVR or WebXR. It allows you to leverage the browser of any device on Smartphone/Cardboards, PCs or VR devices to generate XR applications. There are a few platforms out in the market such as ZREALITY Sphere, which allow you to leverage this technology with no programming skills required.
#3 User experience in VR is not clearly defined yet
User experience design for VR has to be reinvented still in the market. Complexity of user interaction in 3D increases and no standards are evolved. You have to support new controller types for VR, touch navigation, gazing and much more. Nevertheless a great user eperience is key and you need to build up knowledge in entering the 3rd dimension or use tools supporting you in it.
#4 3D data needs to be optimized for VR/AR Marketing
Only few companies have marketing-ready 3D contents yet. Do not underestimate the time and know-how required to take 3D-data from your CAD system and optimize it for 3D/XR web usage.
#5 Make sure you can measure success
Measuring success is not yet widely adopted in VR/AR as the number of applications is still small. Nevertheless using WebXR technology you can easily use standard tools such as Google Analytics to get deep insights in how many people access your applications- or even check how they move through a 3D environment or where they look.
Hope you liked this article and stay tuned for more insights!