This post gives a short overview of what you can do and which tools to use to maximize the reach of VR content that you publish. It will also outline some pitfalls.
Rule No. 1 of VR: No shortcuts
Rule No. 2 of VR: seriously, no shortcuts. This is important. Stick to native SDKs and high-performance 3D rendering. Stay away from WebVR and JavaScript. WebVR will become a great standard one day in the future, but right now we are months away from the sort of adoption and user-friendly-ness it needs to be suitable for the run-in-the-middle consumer. If you don’t believe me or disagree, just head over to this Sketchfab 3D Model (or any other, really) and enter VR mode on your mobile phone. Unless you are on the latest-generation Android device you’ll see a distorted mess, which runs well below what anybody would call smooth.
If you’re absolutely in no position to use a native-code VR player, you can choose krpano (or Kolor Panotour, which is built on top of krpano) to wrap your 360 images and video. They have decent enough cross-platform support and some nifty workarounds in place to mitigate the most common browser-based VR pitfalls.
For 3D content use Unity 3D. There might be other tools, but especially true if you are a beginner, Unity offers the quickest results.
Figure out a way to serve everyone. As I have outlined in previous posts, there are many different VR device types out there, and all together, there’s not yet a huge amount of VR devices at all. Aiming to reach everyone will give you a decent audience reach in the end. If you set out and only publish your content on Oculus, or HTC Vive, or GearVR, you can be sure that you will exclude over 80 percent of the total audience.
You should also offer a non-VR mode to access your content. While VR is a good way to get an extra kick out of an experience,you should never ever only offer a VR mode; this will exclude anyone without a VR device from your potential audience, which will shrink the reach of your content dramatically. You also have to consider social situations in which people might access your content (for example, on the bus or waiting in line at the airport) where it is not feasible to enter a VR-based view mode.
Fragmentation in VR is huge; it means that out of 100 users that access your VR content, only 10 might use the same type and generation of VR device at the same time. Unless you are creating a VR game (where it might be practical to only target one device type at a time) you should always aim to support all VR devices out there.
Here are some pointers on how to make that feasible and some common pitfalls:
Great content needs to be shared. Make sure your content can be shared and include calls to action for users about what to do once they consumed the main portion of your content. Direct them to related content, or to a website where they can learn more about what they have seen (outside VR).
Today, VR is still a challenge. It is still a challenge to create great VR content, it’s a challenge to publish and deploy it and after that it’s an even bigger one to reach 100 percent of your potential audience. Don’t despair; everybody is dealing with the same issues and there’s no magic solution yet. We are working on it, however.
Andreas is the founder and CEO of Vuframe. He’s been working with augmented andvirtual reality on a daily basis for the past 8 years. Vuframe’s mission is to democratize AR & VR by removing the tech barrier for everyone.
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