From physical human interaction to virtual reality (VR), the evolution of communication has gone full circle.
Marketing today requires as much personal attention as it did centuries ago, however with the advancement of new technologies, being able to create immersive experiences like riding on a spacecraft or house-hunting from your office is just a VR headset away.
Tyrone Rubin is a filmmaker and the founder of SenseVirtual; a company that offers VR solutions for South Africa’s educational and marketing needs.“VR is a completely new medium that allows a person to be placed into any experience imaginable. The user is able to interact with this world, walk around and perform any action they dream of,” explains Rubin.
The use of VR technologies has through the years helped marketers better reach their consumers. A recent example of this is SenseVirtual’s work with the Adidas brand to promote football to scholars. The concept involved filming Orlando Pirates soccer players during their training schedules and football games. This footage was then converted to a VR 360 degree format and then shown to schoolkids on a bus using VR headsets. “The kids felt completely immersed with their favourite footballers and the game,” shares Rubin.
In another school focussed project, the team used VR experiences to teach children the basics of business, maths and economics. Through the use of VR devices, they saw the huge impact and interest that VR technology creates for the advancement of learning. “When a student is completely immersed in a VR experience the retention rate of the student is extremely high,” Rubin adds.
Rubin says that he has always been a fan of VR, however it was in 2014 when he tried the first Oculus prototype that he truly believed that there would be a market for the technology in South Africa: “I started seeing that there were actual real world problems that I could solve using this technology. I also noted that various industries found the need to create VR experiences either to enhance their products or to be used in an entertaining manner.”
This prompted him to start his own VR company, SenseVirtual and later team up with Richard Ramsbottom, who had already been developing VR experiences, and is now the company’s CTO and co-founder.
The team has since then developed content and VR experiences for a number of brands in sports, education, real estate and retail. Their VR equipment includes the HTC Vive, an Oculus Rift, along with a powerful PC to run the VR experience, however for mobile phone experiences, they use the Samsung Gear VR.
One of the company’s most notable VR applications is a property viewing app for local real estate companies. The app allows property agents to relieve themselves of the stress of driving to various locations to view different properties with clients. The use of mobile VR headsets will allow agents to immerse clients inside more properties than ever before with a 360-degree VR view of any property.
SenseVirtual is also currently working on an in-store VR retail experience that will give stores the opportunity to offer their shoppers immersive experiences with their products. Internationally, VR retail experiences are a huge trend, especially in the fashion world. The Tommy Hilfiger brand recently launched a VR experience in their stores for shoppers to witness the designer’s autumn collection debut from the runway.
Talking about SenseVirtual’s VR retail experience, Rubin says: “These deeply engaging VR booths will draw customers into stores to experience first of its kind technology. Customers will be able to explore an infinite amount of products and product information; they will be able to learn about the brand and products in an entertaining and engaging manner, and will be able to interact with products in a magnificent dream-like environment.”
VR technology has also been welcomed in bringing far-fetched dreams closer to reality for the user, while also helping users share their experience with a group. For Universal Healthcare, SenseVirtual created an activation whereby they had six people at a time entering into a spaceship and all simultaneously experiencing an entertaining space adventure.
In the UK, a similar experience is used by medical institutions to train surgeons from all over the world as if they are in the same room. “The aim for any VR experience is something called presence. Presence is the feeling in VR where the person completely believes they are in the virtual world in every possible sense.”
While the South African public have shown great enthusiasm in the future of VR technology, Africa still has to gain more knowledge and produce more VR developers for the industry to grow. “In 2014 there were only a handful of us in South Africa building VR solutions and experiences. Since then the number of developers in the VR space locally continues to grow. These VR developers and VR storytellers are continually creating experiences in so many varied industries. The highlights have been witnessing and playing a part of this continual day to day growth,” confirms Rubin.
Rubin is also the founder of Virtual Reality South Africa (VRSA) which aims to seek more awareness for VR industries in order to grow the local skill set of VR developers and VR filmmakers.
Rubin and his team have hosted workshops in specialised learning institutions for filmmakers and developers interested in exploring the VR field. “There are two types of content one can create with VR: a 360-degree video and CG (Computer Graphics). With AFDA we created workshops to teach students and industry professionals how to create 360-degree video content from start to finish. We also worked together with Friends of Design to teach students how to transfer their game concepts into VR,” shares Rubin.
Some of these students have ended up collaborating or working on SenseVirtual’s events division, EventsVirtual. “More recently we have created VR experiences at events for Sanlam, Google, Barclays, MiWay and Dell,” says Rubin.
In May 2017, SenseVirtual hosted an eLearning conference where Rubin led a discussion on why VR is playing a major role in the sphere of education and training. “The talk highlighted the key values that VR adds in the world of education and training such as immersion, engagement, presence, interactivity, safety, affordability and more,” he shares.
The SenseVirtual team is now planning South Africa’s first Virtual Reality Hackathon, which will make it the second VR hackathon in Africa after last year’s event hosted in Lagos, Nigeria by Imisi 3D.
“We feel that SA is leading the way forward in Africa when it comes to using VR in the widest arrays of industries. The key difference between Africa and the rest of the world is that in places like America, Europe and Asia, the VR market is currently a lot larger industry. I am confident we will get there in time,” Rubin concluded.
