Earlier this week when I received my Google Cardboard virtual reality contraption, I was amazed by the experience, but I could not come up with a way to leverage this new and upcoming medium to truly enrich the campaigns I manage for our clients. Today, that changed completely! Facebook has announced that they will begin publicly selling Virtual Reality ad space in your news feed. More importantly, there is no contraption necessary which means that you can experience the VR without an Oculus Rift headset. No doubt tier one advertisers will be on this almost immediately, in fact I just stumbled onto an ad for the new Infiniti Q60 concept.
Mind you this is nowhere near the augmented reality #technology that we currently use in our direct mail campaigns, but those require the installation of an “app” on the tablet or mobile device and leverage the device’s camera to essentially create a hologram in front of the user. One of the more memorable versions of this that I saw was from of all things, a Vespa video that I was able to dig up. After some research, I was able to find the original Vespa video.
It will be interesting to see when and how the manufacturers of tablets and smartphones are able to integrate the Augmented Reality technology to exist as part of the browsers or operating systems. When that happens, I think we will see the entire landscape change!
