
1. The 360 Video Phenomenon
According to Immersive Media, VR video increases time spent watching by 5 times, viewing frequency by 6 times and an increase in sharing by 7 times. In StoryUP's street team interactions, we're seeing these statistics play out in the real world. People will take off their headsets after more than 7 minutes watching an immersive story and say...."can I watch that again?" Because the video is all around them, they're afraid they might have missed something.
Jack Silverstein, editor and Chief at the New York Times, said recently at a SXSW 2016 panel that the average view session on the NYT Google Cardboard app was 8 minutes. Silverstein went on to say more than 60 percent of views on the app were in Google Cardboard.
2. VR is Ageless
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World War II Veteran on an Honor Everywhere tour |
3. The "internet" is no longer flat.
Just as brands had to make their sites responsive for mobile, so too will they also have to make them responsive for VR because the "internet" is becoming a place you step into. Some VR creators are already ditching the "flat apps" in favor of VR mobile sites built with Web VR and viewed in 360. Most of these stories are consumed in a seated position right now but with headsets like the new HTC Vive out in 2016, it's now possible for more consumers to walk around the room in Virtual Reality with what's called "room scale VR".

4. Headset Not Always Required: You don't necessarily need a headset to watch a 360-degree experience. You can view the video outside of a headset by using your cursor to drag around the screen. You can also use your finger to swipe around the video on your mobile device. If you don't want to use your hands, turn your body and the video turns with you. It's not the same effect as feeling like you're inside the video but for now at least, that's how the majority of your audience could be viewing your videos...outside of a headset.
If you want a glimpse of the depth of the upcoming 'metaverse', read the book "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline. Stephen Spielberg signed on to direct the movie. One theme of the book is how people are sucked into VR to the point of losing touch with the real world. While VR could be seen in the future as leading to a decline of a shared human experience, I see it differently. VR is the next evolution of flat video chat. Skype, Hangouts and FaceTime reconnected the world face to face in real time. VR is no different. In shared spaces like AltSpace VR and High Fidelity, we can talk to real humans live in a virtual world. These spaces are also becoming places to consume content, shop and share information.
5. Prepare for the Datapoolooza
With more data, brands would have more fuel to hyper-personalize products. "The potential datapoolooza could dwarf the number and kind of data points that marketers now acquire from websites, mobile apps and other sources," Scott Rayden of 3Q Digital told Marketing Land. The data deluge could also help us Journalists and Brand Journalists tell better stories by better understanding which storytelling inputs are most effective in directing audience attention. As advertisers already struggle to compete for the audience's attention, will the audience want to see logos while they're immersed? Or as is the case in the gaze heat map below, will they just want to look at the pretty girl.
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Gaze Heat Map |
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