Can you imagine that in today’s world, you can visit and explore certain locations where you don’t have to leave your own home, and all that can happen by using a VR headset? Recent technology brought us new possibilities for living in a virtual reality world. It can offer promising possibilities for businesses across different sectors, so customers can have VR experiences. Here’s everything you need to know about VR 360.
The World of Virtual Reality
From the first head-mounted VR system in the late 1960s to the first commercial products in the 1980s, there have been decades of experimentation with virtual reality. Hollywood’s interpretation of VR in the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man also had a significant impact on public perceptions of VR for some time after.
VR Headsets
American teenager Palmer Luckey created a VR headset prototype in 2010 that would, later on, be known as the Oculus Rift. The tech industry’s interest in virtual reality (VR) was revived two years later when he launched a $250,000 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to monetize it. Two years later, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried and loved the VR headset so he decided to buy it for $2B.
The Rise of Virtual Reality in the world of Technology
Since then, many competitors have appeared, including the HTC Vive, Sony’s PlayStation VR, and phone-powered headgear like Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. While this is going on, hundreds of developers are working on VR games and apps, filmmakers are exploring the possibilities for documentaries and animation, and Facebook and YouTube have jumped on board with 360-degree videos.
What is a Virtual Reality?
Virtual Reality, or VR, is a technology that allows users to immerse themselves in a specially created or simulated environment. Through the use of VR goggles or other technologies, users can interact in virtual, simulated spaces.
In VR, everything appears to be happening all around us, as opposed to experiences on a monitor, which we can only view via a rather distant window. Particularly when your body is fully immersed in the contact, they appear close and immediate, and occasionally even realistic.
Virtual Reality Kit
The headset is the most important tool in the VR kit. Affordable VR headsets use a cellphone while expensive ones need a computer to run software or application. All headsets should be used with a good pair of headphones.
Optional accessories range from hand controllers to treadmills, all of which are designed to increase your sense of immersion in a virtual world. Standard gaming joypads can also be used, but hand controllers connect your physical gestures to the game or program you’re using.
Types of Virtual Reality
The VR industry still has a long way to go before achieving its goal of creating a fully immersive experience for users allowing them to feel a variety of emotions that are close to reality. However, the technology has advanced significantly in terms of delivering a genuine sensory experience and holds potential for commercial application in various industries.
Here are the different types of virtual reality that marketing teams and companies may want to explore in the future.
1. Fully immersive
The user has the most immersive experience in the virtual 3D environment thanks to this type of VR, which offers the highest quality of virtual reality. It includes hearing, seeing, and occasionally touching. Even some attempts with the addition of smell have been conducted.
Users can completely interact with their surroundings when they are wearing specialized gear like helmets, goggles, or gloves. Other customers use tools like treadmills or stationary bikes allowing them the feeling of moving inside the 3D world.
2. Semi-immersive
Through a computer screen, a pair of glasses, or virtual reality headsets, this kind of VR provides a limited VR experience. It does not involve physical movement like full immersion does and instead focuses on the visual 3D part of virtual reality. The flight simulator, which is used by airlines and the military to train their pilots, is a typical example of semi-immersive VR.
3. Non-immersive
In most cases, a 3D simulated environment that can be accessed through a computer screen is what non-immersive virtual reality is all about. Depending on the software, the surroundings might also produce sound.
Using a keyboard, mouse, or other devices, the user can influence the virtual world to some extent, but the environment does not communicate with the user directly. Non-immersive VR is exemplified by video games and websites that let users customize the look of a room.
360 vs virtual reality
The terms “virtual reality” and “360” are often times used conversely, but there are key differences between them. 360-degree content uses combined panoramic images and videos to let the users turn their heads and look around. But 360 videos or images are not a virtual world compared to fully immersive virtual reality experiences where a person can move around and explore.
The two popular VR headsets that let users experience 360 content and explore the virtual reality space are Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard.
The Application of Virtual Reality in the Modern World
The development of virtual reality technology may be far from finished, and there are different possibilities that several industries can explore to make the experience more interactive and immersive for users. Here are various sectors that could benefit from exploring VR experience in the future.
1. Exhibits and Museums
Users can experience interactive art exhibits, museums, and galleries with the help of a simulated virtual environment. Using a virtual reality headset, users feel immersed in an interactive environment where they can move their bodies as if they’re in a real exhibit.
2. Tourism
You may now experience a holiday before booking a real one due to developments in virtual reality. Virtual reality (VR) technology’s capacity to take you to locations that are unlikely for you to visit in person. Whether the location is too expensive, too dangerous, inaccessible due to mobility concerns, or just because you don’t like flying, is one way to look at how virtual reality can work in the tourism sector.
Imagine that you can take a tour of Barcelona or Budapest from the comfort of your home in Singapore or California. You can do exactly that using VR. You may travel from anywhere in the world, and enjoy a Harry Potter tour of Edinburgh or even the surface of Mars. With hundreds of available virtual tours or field trips, using specific software allows a business or customers to experience and explore places that one can only imagine. And in the future, the VR world can make a location become more accessible to potential clients at a lower cost.
3. Entertainment
Games play a huge role in today’s VR because games are somewhat easier to understand to use in the entertainment category to showcase this technology. And that is partially true because the initial Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR headsets were designed particularly for gamers.
VR is being used in the entertainment sector to boost 360-degree video experiences (examples on YouTube) and strengthen viewers’ emotional connections to the characters and the story. For instance, animation studios like Disney use VR to bring viewers access to red-carpet events and cast interviews for their film “The Jungle Book.”
VR might also transform the way media content is created, as a Singapore animation studio like SuperPixel has demonstrated. SuperPixel can create a 3D environment where developers can integrate their programs to build interactive animated shows or live-stream animated performances on VR platforms like Twitch.
4. Events, Meetings, and Conferences
It’s not surprising that the pandemic saw an increase in VR events, conferences, and meetings where VR space allows people to virtually connect in places. Collaborative, interactive meetings may be held with colleagues from anywhere in the world using virtual reality platforms like Glue, Arthur, and Meeting Room.
If you put on your headset in London, you may connect and collaborate virtually with your co-workers in New York and Madrid as though you were all in the same room. They can make remote or hybrid meetings, which don’t require travel time or money, as effective as face-to-face meetings by using collaborative tools like whiteboards and freehand 3D drawings.
Sooner than you might expect, VR is likely to have an impact on your job, hobbies, and social life. The only activities we cannot replace in VR at this time are eating and sleeping, despite its seemingly limitless potential.
Also read: Augmented reality vs. virtual reality: Key differences
Virtual Reality and its potential use for businesses
The recent development in technology tells us that virtual reality is here to stay. In the future, the use of virtual reality can be an essential part of a business to let its customers feel immersed in a virtual world as if it’s real. An animation video company can help you visualize the environment you want to set in a virtual world where users can feel more connected wherever they are in the world.
SuperPixel’s animation process helps you visualize a place where users feel immersed in a virtual world through the 3D animation environment created suitable for business needs. Chat with us today and let us be part of your virtual reality project.
