Virtual sanity

YOLO was a mobile app developed (presumably at some expense) by restaurant chain TGI Fridays. 

It enabled customers on a night out to sidestep the familiar functionality of their phone’s camera or, indeed, the ease and ubiquity of their favourite messaging platforms. Instead, through the app, they could capture those TGI-watermarked ‘YOLO’ moments with photos, videos and comments all in one place - even inviting friends and family to collaborate by downloading the app themselves, creating a profile, allowing permissions and joining your virtual party. 

Greymail was an augmented reality game launched by Microsoft’s Outlook brand that allowed users to wave their phone in thin air and ‘catch’ as many unwanted pieces of falling mail as possible - highlighting the problem of newsletters and other subscriptions clogging up your inbox. It was fun and educational.

Advertising, this is why you can’t have nice things.

And Dell Island was a virtual landmass created by everyone’s favourite PC manufacturer in Second Life - the cro-magnon metaverse. Notable attractions included a moderately-sized town square complete with a fountain sculpture in the shape of a Dell logo. 

Advertising, this is why you can’t have nice things.

Or, more accurately, this is why you can’t have new things. You’ve so often gotten it a bit wrong….

Above: Dell Island - one of Second Life's hot destinations...

Ok ok, I promise to get off my neggy soapbox in a moment. We’ve all been there - the lure of a shiny new technology… the client who sniffs a Fast Company feature… etc. But it’s undeniable how naughty the ad industry can be at taking something potentially game-changing and forcing the same old thinking through it. What mechanic do we have for garnering as much of your attention as possible to put our brand in front of you… and for how long?!?

So how do we stop this happening to the emerging technology perhaps most relevant for Shots readers today (people in the business of creating the most richly immersive content possible) - Virtual Reality? With the recent launch of Apple’s Vision Pro, we could well see consumer tech history repeating itself and mass-adoption quickly following Apple’s perfectly tailored suit… Put simply, now is the time for brands to work out how to do VR well. 

It’s undeniable how naughty the ad industry can be at taking something potentially game-changing and forcing the same old thinking through it.

So, who better to turn to for guidance than one of its founding fathers - computer scientist, futurologist, and all-round OG Jaron Lanier? Part soothsaying nerd, part dreadlocked wizard, he’s the guy who wrote the chemical formula for Kool-Aid but generally tells you why we should be careful drinking it.

Lanier has written extensively on the technology that he helped to define, and always with a deft combination of pragmatism and humanism. But it was a recent piece for The New Yorker that piqued my interest - specifically for how his pleas to the VR community could translate to people who make stuff for brands.

Above: Jaron Lanier - Part soothsaying nerd, part dreadlocked wizard.

Action not advertising

Firstly, we need to allow users to take an active, rather than a passive, role. As Lanier says, ‘The illusion at the heart of virtual reality requires activity… and yet we often see VR depicted as a funnel that dumps spectacular experiences into the brain...’ Tequila behemoth Patron’s VR experience, which allowed users to discover the distillation process from the POV of a buzzing bee (shot with custom-specced drones, natch) is a great example of just this - it’s nice, but it’s still an ad. Just a spectacularly swoopy one. 

We need to allow users to take an active, rather than a passive, role.

IKEA’s VR Home Design - in comparison - allows people to create rooms from scratch - playing with colour, design and hygge-inducing products which they can then directly locate online and in-store to make virtual reality a lived one. It’s not designed to replace the retailer’s strident and successful comms campaigns; rather it’s about using VR to let customers take IKEA’s world and start drawing from it to build their own. If that’s not a big marketing KPI ‘tick’, I’ve no idea what is.

So, by all means, make it a thoroughly branded experience full of all your lovely distinctive assets (and products!), but allow the user to play a role rather than have it wash over them like a fancy ad. After all, to forgo movement, interaction and even human agency in a VR experience is to miss the very thing that differentiates it from other media. 

Above: IKEA’s VR Home Design allows people to create rooms from scratch.

From attention to immersion

At the heart of this next principle is an almost-certainly controversial assertion that when it comes to virtual experiences, immersion beats attention. Put more simply, you should expect your users to be there for a good time, not necessarily a long time. But here’s the kicker - the reason for this isn’t simply the quality of that experience, but rather the lovely alchemy that’s possible when you let people drop back into the real world soon after.

You should expect your users to be there for a good time, not necessarily a long time.

‘We used to try to sneak flowers or pretty crystals in front of people before they would take off their headsets’, explains Lanier. ‘It was a great joy to see their expressions as they experienced awe… like someone might experience when appreciating a flower while on a psychedelic drug. But it was actually the opposite of that. They were perceiving the authentic ecstasy of the ordinary, anew.’

Bringing this back into the realm of branded experiences, an interesting brief emerges: how can VR help breathe new life back into a brand or product? Perhaps shifting perception… or highlighting an overlooked product benefit? And how might you then combine a VR experience with a distinctly physical one to make this happen? This makes VR a potentially powerful tool for helping people reassess - precisely in the places or spaces where you might want to influence action or even purchase. Experiential and retail agencies… you’re up!

Above: The Patrón VR experience, which allowed users to buzz around the Hacienda Patrón.

A life-(re)affirming opportunity

Finally, we need to realign our ambitions for VR and bring them closer to home… or rather to the human experience. The temptation with something like VR is to become slaves to what’s now known in tech culture as ‘the religion of infinity’. How do we use it to fly? To explore the outer reaches of the universe? To inhabit bodies that we’ve never lived in before or throw conventional physics out of the window… etc? 

And yet, no matter how fantastical, there is one common denominator in every VR experience we create and that’s the fact that it’s a human experiencing it. This makes VR what Lanier so effectively describes as a ‘conscious-noticing machine’. In other words, this is a technology that can remind us of what it means to be alive. 

This is a technology that can remind us of what it means to be alive

This is precisely the reason that I personally adore The Wayback - a series of VR films designed to help people living with dementia and their carers. Each film is based on hours of painstaking research - ‘memory sessions’ conducted in care homes that are knitted together to create immersive snapshots of days gone by. 

From revisiting England winning the 1966 World Cup in a heaving pub to preparing snacks in the kitchen to celebrate the Queen’s coronation, these films use fine - and often mundane details - to trigger bigger and richer emotional recollections. It’s VR literally helping people - who otherwise might struggle - to reconnect with their lived experiences.