Everything You Need To Know About Virtual Reality — UNBXD

Virtual reality is a computer technology that replicates an environment, real or imagined, and simulates a user's physical presence to allow for user interaction. Virtual realities artificially create sensory experience, which can include sight, touch, hearing, and smell.

VR is not just for games! It's is a piece of technology that will be taking the world by storm and applied across a huge range of industries in the next few years. Revenues from VR products are expected to increase from $90 million to $5.2 Billion by 2018! It is also forecast that by 2018 the number of active VR users is to reach 171 million.

Ben-Hur | 360 Video | Paramount Pictures International

Entertainment & Gaming

Virtual reality may be the next frontier of filmmaking, thanks to 360-degree stereoscopic cameras and binaural audio used to achieve an immersive viewing experience. The major obstacle for the directors of VR movies is creating stimulating dynamic camera movements without inducing motion sickness, tell a predetermined story, and make the experience interactive without completely 'gamifying' the VR film experience.

To see some great examples (that you can view on your smartphone) of how this is breaking its way into social media check out - facebook.com/360videoview

In the gaming industry, at the moment there are two major players offering high-end VR Headsets currently on sale - The Oculus Rift, and the HTC Vive - although they only serve a small market. Sony will soon be changing this by releasing Playstation VR which should potentially open the market to tens of millions of consumers.

Expect to see VR in gaming in a big way in 2017!

Oculus Rift - £899.00 (Amazon) HTC Vive - £808.00 (Amazon)

Whitehaven Beach and Hamilton Island, Queensland, Australia | 360 Video

Travel & Tourism

Using 360 cameras and VR headsets users now have the ability to experience and see things in a way that in the past they wouldn't have been able to, without leaving their own home.

Companies likeYouVisit.com are already doing this by using their app, which allows you to select from a range of categories. By either using 360 or Virtual Reality you can experience travel destinations, events, education, plus many more.

Health Care & Education

Virtual Reality has been used for training and education for many years by the military, law enforcement, research labs and even NASA. Only now has the technology become available for the average consumer as mobile phone technology has driven the price of a headset down.

Healthcare is one of the biggest adopters of virtual reality which encompasses surgery simulation, phobia treatment, robotic surgery and skills training. One of the advantages of using VR is that it allows healthcare professionals to learn new skills as well as refreshing existing ones in a safe environment. Plus it allows this without causing any danger to the patients.

What Happens Inside Your Body? | 360 Video

Interactive 360 Video, Luxus Immobilie, Luxury Property

Real Estate & Virtual Tours

UNBXD now offer 360 film and photography as a service which means that we can create virtual tours of properties that can be sent to clients and be viewed either using their smartphone or using a VR headset if they have their own.

The benefits of being able to send potential customers a VR/360 Video mean that they can view a property in a much better way than through traditional photography and makes a location easier to understand.

360 Virtual Reality Video | Champ d'Or Real Estate

Microsoft Reveal HoloLens Augmented Reality Headset

Augmented Reality

I thought I would also touch on augmented reality, which is something that, as you can see above, Microsoft has been developing recently in answer to this technological leap. In the video you'll see that in comparison to Virtual Reality which creates an entire artificial experience, Augmented Reality combines real environments as surfaces to be interacted with the technology to create a more natural interaction.

Final Notes

If there's anything mentioned here that you would like to discuss with a member of our team, or think we could assist your brand or company using VR or 360 Film & Photography, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

As always, thanks for reading!