Australia’s VR and AR marketing revolution has already arrived
A novated lease, in its most basic sense, is a way to utilise pre-tax income to fund car loan repayments. The perk being, of course, to reduce overall taxable income each year, leaving users with more money to spend. “The problem is that it’s quite a complex issue to understand,” says Rapid Films’ Dan White, diplomatically. Or, as he later puts it more bluntly: “It can also be a boring thing to explain to someone because it’s not something you can just tell a person who doesn’t know what it is.”
Rapid Films, though, isn’t a creative agency. It’s a pioneering film production studio, based in Sydney, that uses virtual and augmented reality to do the kind of things that marketers would have, not long ago, considered science fiction. And so, presented with a dry topic, the business used technology to bring the story to life. “Our goal was to simplify it,” he adds. “We wanted to make the experience of learning about it enjoyable because that makes retention so much greater.”
White and his team used AR to overlay a map of Australia on users’ desktop, to visualise the different cars and locations where deals were available. Users can tap their phone to look inside the vehicles on offer. There is then the option to have a virtual test drive. “All of a sudden someone young or old can understand how you explore this.”
White is talking at a fireside chat hosted by Facebook at Advertising Week. The social media giant and Rapid Films have, over the last couple of years, partnered to deliver these kinds of unique experiences. It’s a partnership that makes sense: Facebook can provide the reach and platform, while a production house such as Rapid can bring fresh ideas and creativity on how to get the best out of not just augmented but virtual reality.
Yet, still, in 2018, it’s easy for marketers to think of both advancements as some kind of far-away science fiction. The stuff used by boffins in Silicon Valley. But really, AR and VR are about to hit a mainstream tipping point, with Australia one of the pioneering locations. In fact, the AR/VR industry is predicted to be worth $148bn worldwide as soon as 2021. It’s why Facebook shelled out $2.75bn to buy the world-leading VR technology, Oculus, and why it has overhauled tools for developers.
“Over a year ago we announced we were starting to deploy a platform called AR Studio,” explains Jason Juma-Ross, Facebook’s head of tech, entertainment and connectivity. “Facebook’s augmented reality camera now reaches 1.5bn people irrespective of whether they are on Android or iOS.” AR Studio allows non-techies, without detailed programming expertise, to create AR experiences, by dragging and dropping 3D effects and sounds. These can now reach up to 1.5B people around the world. “What they’ve done,” says Devin Ehrig, a partner at creative VR agency Shadow Factory, “is make AR accessible and approachable for clients and agencies.”
In fact, AR Studio was just the start. A recent upgrade has made it location based. Now marketers can turn out-of-home movie posters, say, fully interactive, no matter where it is hung up. It even works at strange angles, or in poor lighting. Today, more and more brands are using similar tech to create interactive experiences – from decorating your home with IKEA furniture pre-purchase to seeing real-time information on food in grocery stores.
And it’s not just augmented. Virtual reality, too, has the potential to change the way we think about the world. Facebook Spaces started off as an interactive hangout area where users can build cartoon avatars and meet their friends in virtual reality to play games, mess about or even meet for a business conference. But today it can create a more lifelike experience. “It started off with the basic level likeness,” says Juma-Ross. “But then we developed an avatar to make eye contact, to infer where all parts of a body are and estimate facial expressions. Now we can make a lifelike avatar that can scan people’s faces in real time straight from a headset.”
In fact, similar advancements are being made by the University of Sydney, which has become a world leader in using the technology. “The interest from nurses and doctors in hospitals has been unbelievable,” says Philip Poronnik, professor of biomedical sciences at the institution. “We’ve got lots and lots of applications such as helping prepare patients for operations.”
What has been slowing VR’s progress down, so far, is the steep entry price-point. “It’s a little bit of chicken and egg right now,” says Helen Crossley, Facebook’s head of consumer research. “The consumer base is growing, for sure, but customers are saying ‘Do I buy something when there’s not a ton of content just yet and it’s still growing?’”
It’s why Facebook launched Oculus Go, an all-in-one virtual reality headset that crams in much of the same tech as its bigger brother, Oculus Rift, but for only $299. It has the potential, say analysts, to jump-start the industry by democratising the hardware. “It’s part of our goal to get one billion people using VR,” says Juma-Ross “It makes it super accessible. When it launched, we had about 1000 apps, with many of them developed in Australia.”
“Now I could see it deployed across all the clinics everywhere,” adds Poronnik. “They’re so accessible and very user-friendly.” Now, he thinks, it can be used not just for helping patients but helping with operations and training doctors. In the way that airline pilots learn in simulators, surgeons could one day experiment using an Oculus Go headset on virtual patients.
Or as Poronnik concludes: “It’s a total game-changer.”