How VR Alters Everything and helps Connecting with the Customers

Understanding our customer is what we all aim for. Because of this reason, we get out of bed every day and this is what keeps us up at night. Knowing their problems are difficult: from cancer treatment to service providing for autistic children and 360-degree view for shoppers. Product development teams must empathize with the diverse users across all industry types and this difficulty must get incorporated into our software.
Innovative ways to better know our customers and sharing the knowledge across our organizations is what we must be looking forward to. Start experimenting a little bit with teams using VR to conduct customer research on location with real users.

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From the hype and games into the useful, practical and widely acceptable way, VR has moved so much.  VR has moved beyond this hype that got created.

Sensory experience, incredibly immersive that allow viewers to connect deeply with those who are being recorded. By seeing someone’s world from their perspective, enable you to empathize with their viewpoint and understand their feelings. VR can be used to appreciate difficulty level of the customer’s needs through recording them while performing the jobs and sharing 360-degree videos widely across the organizations.

You can tell what it would like to be a part of an interacting session with a patient in a doctor’s office or selling shoes in a retail store. By understanding the customers better, it will result in developing much better products than before.

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VR research is cheaper than the setup and scaling. Lean mentality team which always tries a minimal viable idea before going all in on an experiment does well. Consumer grade cameras have hit a rapid low in price and are only improving every quarter.

The equipment should be used as such to conduct the research costing less than $1000 entirely which includes two cameras with live streaming capabilities, various Google Cardboard Headsets, all the software and cords required to do the jobs. This is cheaper for technology which was literally science fiction. Most frugal budgets can also afford this setup.

Nikon recently announced that a 4k 360 VR camera costs around $500. You can use it around or by immersing it in water while capturing sharp videos backed with 360 degrees. A year ago, something like this would have cost around certain thousand dollars. Things are moving this fast in this area.

Museums Started Adopting Virtual Reality Technique

A virtual reality presentation model named theBlu has been added to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in between megamouth shark, bison diorama, and a bunch of excited school kids.

In general admission fees of $12, with an extra $10 fee, visitors can put on a VR headset and explore the ocean with blue whales swimming over the head or a group of silvery fish darting by. Visitors can use virtual flashlights to further explore the abyss.

Senior project manager and developer from the VR presentation model say that for the young audience, this thing is attractive. Experiment with VR technology in order to get more people in the door and interested in a wider collection is going on.

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This appeal is not restricted only to tech-savvy teens. Several older adults also come to have a look. This is the first time they were doing anything like this and they were thrilled by the idea.

This kind of exposure is something the virtual reality industry is chasing as a whole. Despite the promise made by VR as the next big thing in technology industry, it’s still to get mainstream.

Venues apart from home are a great space for the public to have their first experience in VR, according to the CEO of the company behind the Blu.

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Wevr gave a loan to the museum, the computers, and headsets. But, the company's broader vision is to make fans of this technology. At some point, perhaps, people will get inspired for buying their own headset and also to subscribe to the VR content produced by Wevr.

Some institutions are coming up with VR tours which allow users to explore the galleries in 3D and 360 degrees for the users that are already comfortable with VR. It enables them to go where people are. It’s no worry that VR will replace what is real. The more the image is digital to publish online, the great attendance it would gather. People when come to know that something exists, they want to experience it in real, original way. And that real life feeling is something VR isn’t yet able to replicate.

The experience is partial; it’s a glimpse or a hint, like seeing something which makes you want to see more. In VR tours, the sounds of museums get missed, the footsteps and whispers of echoes and conversations. 

Startups will Dominate Augmented Reality and not Virtual Reality

The excitement of Pokémon Go is still on but I think that for investing, virtual reality is not a good area to invest, instead augment reality is. Considering the checkpoints in the value chain, there is a difference between the two.

Each media needs means to work, the medium, the matter, content distribution, discovery of the content and monetization. Each of these has its own theory which depends on the medium. The different theory leads to a separate propensity to be managed by a small group of companies.

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By medium, we mean the way through the content/matter is presented to the user. So, for newspaper, printing press and paper becomes the medium. Similarly, network is the medium for internet. The act of getting to the user is not what is meant here rather than the means. Record labels may have the distribution function but Amazon and iTunes are the medium for distribution.

Radio industry has radio sets as mediums, distribution through radio broadcasts, radio shows as content and branded networks to facilitate sell advertising and content discovery. The cost of economies of scale of content discovery and ad sales would mean that the radio industry got dominated by the networks who were the owner of these things and the creators of the matter were not paid very well. The radio sets were subsidized automatically in order to build the audience targeted to create the economies of scale for the networks and break even business was of radio manufacturing.

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What happened later with television matches with this model and not have been a right place to invest. The networks were created by companies which already had complementary assets and also significantly the cash and political power for them to maintain dominance. As existed earlier, those who win don’t require a financing through venture type and companies that needed financing from outside were inevitably destined to go out of business.

Movie industry has developed differently. Movie studios dominated earlier, at that time and they were primary creators of content. The theaters were the means of distribution and not of studios. This is same as record industry. But because of the disaggregated nature of monetization & distribution, movies and music can be made outside of the studio system and occasionally made money. It is arguable that outside financing is a good bet, but the odds can be worse than VC if one knew what he was doing.

There were not any bottlenecks in the value chains and because of this, internet is different. Opportunities were there in all the sectors. Company startups like Cisco and AOL made money in the same medium along with monetization and content discovery & creation which lead to early concentration at discovery of companies like Google. For the content creators, it has also leaded to quite a tough environment.

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Content creation will dominate Virtual Reality’s value chain similarly like movies and computer gaming. The cost of creating Virtual Reality Content is going to be high so the content development is going to economically dominate distribution and discovery. High cost of content development would mean less popular content discovered through typical marketing and PR; word of mouth.

VR headsets need to be cheap because the reimbursing the content cost will require large audience. They can be subsidized initially but eventually the content developers will need them for high margin and low amount hardware. Scarce and expensive content will bend towards lowest common denominator in order to manage risks through portfolio approach like console computer games. This means that few large companies will dominate virtual reality especially those which enter from adjacent industries.

Augmented Reality is altogether different. Because uses of AR are different and content development will be less expensive due to the fact that it won’t be fully immersive environment so no single part of the value chain will dominate.

Augmented Reality is expected to be more similar to internet and its evolution. Content can be out there and get popular and fade but there won’t be any winner takes all in AR content. Because content is less expensive to make, content tool companies will be required. Because this will further lead to different types of content, hardware makers will do it well. It will be according to worker needs and specified & cheaper content will address more specific problems, so for customers, AR will be more valuable than VR. This will allow both hardware and content makers to have higher margins.

VC investments in virtual reality will end up doing bad as startups will outnumber incumbents. The AR market is wide open, on the contrary.

Source Url :-

http://surevin.com/blog/startups-will-dominate-augmented-reality-not-virtual-reality/

Exploring Data Visualization of VR

VR has the potential to revolutionize the content industry and using it, has discovered the whole new way to analyze human behavior as audiences consume media. Analytics about consumer media have always been regarding understanding demographics, gauging performances and calculating ad revenue. New VR introduces the opportunity for exploring and understanding how people can get engaged with content.

 

With earlier video, VR allows us to track where the people look. This generates wonderful amount of data which represents everyone’s experience in a field of VR content. VR analytics is a platform which was made to harness this data and exposing it in many innovative ways. The aim was to make the data as meaningful and accessible as possible and provide unprecedented access to understanding and monetizing user engagement.

 

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One way to expose the data was through heatmap visualizations of where people looked at in VR. Using color variants superimposed onto the real 360 degree video (VR) screen, the representation of density of viewers looking at each area throughout the video was possible. The result consisted of beautiful fluid heatmap visualization which describes how people engaged with the scene.

Statistical method of cluster analysis was used to further analyze this data to find the “hotspots” which are important areas of interest throughout any immersive experience. Performing the calculations and finding those hotspots need to be distributed over a number of machines in the cloud because it involves so much data and processing, and the computation takes hours.

 

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After cluster analysis is done, the movement types exhibited by people at these hotspots are analyzed and conclusions about audience’s response have been made. There are endless opportunities to explore this type of data and it has all just started.

One industry that will be greatly affected by VR analytics is marketing and advertising. It can be determined what people see if we know where they are looking for. For enabling the platform to identify objects in VR, this information helps in knowing what people look at them and their behavior.  This data becomes meaningful on a large scale. The platform makes the kind of analysis possible like if a brand wants to know what percentage of people see an ad placement or how different genders respond to a scene.

 

 Young handsome man in glasses and virtual headphones

It’s a big challenge to create an immersive narrative in VR, especially since viewers may divert their attention from the story so easily. As the heatmap describes, slight movement along the right of the screen drives half the viewers to follow in that direction. When the screen turns on, you can see everyone quickly shifting their focus. Behavior in VR can be studied this way and the platform will help guide storytelling process for future content.

Source Url :-

http://surevin.com/blog/exploring-data-visualization-of-vr/