This year, more advertisers than ever before have been using the power of VR and AR to create award-winning branded content. The ability to draw your audience in with this new technology and make them part of the very story you are telling enables you to create highly emotional experiences that produce lasting connections.
Join Unity, the platform these experiences are built upon, to learn best practices on how to create and bring these high-touch experiences to a mass audience.
The creators: Isobar and Viacom Recognition: Winner of this year’s Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Digital Craft The tech: A VR music experience featuring Smashing Pumpkin’s frontman, Billy Corgan was created using:
The creators brought the pieces of Aeronaut together in a way that thrusts the user into a stunning experience that points at the amazing potential that digital technology holds for art.
Creating worlds in VR experiences is quite different than in movies. Like movies, VR experiences have a beginning, middle, and end, but each person who goes through them sees different things – based on what they do or where they look and in what order. When making these pieces, creators need to see how all the different components come together in real-time to deliver the experience. The audience, on the other hand, gets real-time feedback to their actions, which determines the path their story takes.
The question for creators then becomes: How do you create content for a real-time world? Our answer is: Set it up like a game, the original real-time storytelling medium.
Creating non-linear content is comprised of two key components: The assets and the production.
Assets in Virtual and Augmented reality need to be in 3D. This extra dimension adds a lot more weight, detail, and complexity, which you need to take into consideration. These are a number of ways you can produce or source 3D assets:
Production for virtual and augmented reality requires the right tools and technical knowledge. A 3D content creation engine like Unity can really speed up the process. You can use Unity to carry out all of the following processes efficiently in real-time:
The creators: Magnopus and Pixar Animation Studios
Recognition: Silver Lion in the Digital Craft category; nominated for an Emmy this year in the Outstanding Original Interactive Program category
The art: In order to bring the detailed, extravagant and brilliant visualizations of the Land of the Dead from Disney/Pixar's Coco to life in VR, Magnopus cultivated new techniques that blended a variety of 360-degree projections for the environment.
While they may seem very different, AR, VR, and 360 have a lot in common when it comes to creating content for each medium. Where they vary wildly is distribution and reach.
Integrates digital information into a user’s environment in real-time using a device. While AR can also exist in a headset (e.g. Google Glass), most AR today is done on smartphones. And here the device penetration is massive.
Immerses the user into a virtual environment with non-linear storytelling. VR can only exist in a headset, and today there are several on the market with more portable, more affordable versions, coming out every few months.
Just because a user has the right device does not mean that they will automatically see your content. The most common and flexible way to get content in front of users is to build it into a standalone app or experience.
Events, storefronts, or live installations also provide an excellent way to promote app usage, especially for VR where users will often stand in line just to try the hardware due to its scarcity.
The winning pieces of 2018 we’ve been highlighting here are full-length pieces of VR content, ranging from 5 to 24 minutes. But just like every movie has a trailer, it’s possible to make short-form VR, AR, and 360 content either by extracting it from the full piece or as a standalone project.
The benefits? Distribution! Unlike apps and experiences, short-form content can be distributed with minimal or no friction to users in places that already capture their attention.
The pitfalls? Length and weight. Since this new content has to be distributed as part of existing, heavier content, it has to be short and lightweight enough to fit the medium.
AR and 360 short-form experiences can be distributed via existing content – i.e. websites or existing apps. YouTube and Facebook both provide platforms for distributing 360 content. Unity is also the first provider to distribute true AR, utilising ARKit and ARCore, content within existing AR and non-AR apps.
VR short-form experiences can also be distributed via portals or existing apps. For example, Unity ran a pilot program with Lionsgate Jigsaw, where an interactive VR branded experience was integrated as a Unity scene into existing Unity apps – including the Samsung Internet for VR app which provides a hub for 360 and VR content for Gear users.
Due to their interactive nature, AR and VR usually require a user tutorial at the beginning of the content. This can be one of the most daunting parts of creating short-form immersive content – getting the user in the action while still having enough time to tell your story. Best practices for short-form content flow: