Accessible Immersion
2017 was a roller coaster of a year trying to establish ourselves in the VR and AR space for the Fashion and Retail industries. It was a year full of opportunities that seemed so certain at the time, only to then be dashed at the last minute for numerous reasons — some of which were on us, and others which were out of our hands. From each failure came more motivation to adapt our path and push forward because we know what we have is special, not just because of the hype around VR and AR but because we have an incredible team doing amazing work and loving it!
We did have cause for a (mini) celebration when we announced our partnership with Maggy London International in December who are piloting our Augmented Reality Product Catalog mobile application.
The AR Product Catalog utilizes our internal photorealistic scanning service that produces true-to-scale 3D renderings of products and Apple’s AR Kit in order to give Sales Associates access to entire collections of clothing line from their smart devices (phew… marketing/PR spiel done!). You can read more about the pilot here.
Heading into what hopes to be another rollercoaster year, I take solace in some of the many things that I had the fortune of learning, and want to share some of our experiences pitching and selling VR and AR concepts into the market, specifically a term we created called ‘Accessible Immersion’.
Accessible Immersion is a concept that I created based on some good advice from a mentor and my experience pitching VR and AR projects in 2017. What we tried to do is provide a framework that can help focus the conversation around some of the most common questions we were getting in these pitches, specifically: what’s the difference between VR and AR, how can a brand use it and what Code & Craft is focusing on.
We found that a framework like this helps avoid the inevitable ‘rabbit holes’ that can derail the conversation early in a pitch. We found that this tends to happen because we’re trying to explain something that’s technologically complex and inherently abstract to an audience with varying degrees of understanding and a healthy amount of skepticism. Establishing your credibility early in the conversation by offering valuable insight is crucial when discussing such an over hyped topic. It doesn’t have to be anything mind blowing, just don’t add hype to hype otherwise people are just going to switch off. We do this by preemptively answering one of the most common questions, ‘What is VR, what is AR and what’s the difference between the two?’
The approach we take is by framing the conversation around ‘Immersion’ and ‘Accessibility’, the former being a trendy word that allows us to explain the difference between ‘going into a virtual world’ (VR) and having the ‘virtual world come to you’ (AR). The latter being a fancy word that addresses the question ‘how many people is this going to reach’ vis-à-vis how can we assign metrics to a potential project such as reach, ROI and ultimately get to some sort of budget discussion
My mentor suggested I create a visual representation of the framework because, “sometimes you just need a slide in a deck that you can point to and say this is where X will fit in.’ So this is my slide!
As I mentioned earlier, the importance of having ‘Immersion’ as an axis is not just to explain the difference between VR and AR it’s also about explaining how that’s achieved from a platform perspective.
I’m not going to get into the semantics of trying to explain what the actual difference is between VR and AR on a technical or psychological level because people much smarter than me have done a much better job than I’ll ever do. My favourite definition is Daro’s definition for MR that I think does a great job of explaining the whole spectrum.
This again comes back to offering some sort of value in the conversation and building credibility around your understanding of the space. We’ve also found that bringing the conversation down to a platform level helps remove some of the abstract concepts of the medium, especially for Virtual Reality because it’s easier to explain the difference in immersion when comparing a cardboard mobile VR headset and a high-end rig like the Rift even if they’re never tried it before, which is less common nowadays.
As I’m sure some of you have spotted my framework doesn’t include any of the windows ‘MR’ headsets, Hololens, Meta2 or any of the other pieces of hardware that might be out on the market at the current time of writing but in my defense we created this framework in early-to-mid 2017 and we feel it would still hold true if it were updated with the latest hardware
Once you’ve established a baseline for what VR is then AR becomes a little easier to explain because the platform is essentially all mobile AR at the moment (from the time of writing) which means all you need to say is “Just pull out your phone and it renders right in front of you on your screen”… or better yet, actually pull out your phone and show them a demo. This is also a great opportunity to try and explain the difference between tracking marker based AR (Vuforia) and more modern mobile AR such as AR Core and AR Kit.
At this point in the pitch we’ve either peaked an interest or just fanned the skepticism in the room so the next question is inevitably ‘How much is this going to cost?’
With any technical project there are the ‘Known knowns’, ‘Known unknowns’ and the ‘Unknown unknowns’. For more established products or industries the scope of work tends to fall in the first two categories with a healthy amount of the dreaded ‘Unknown unknowns’ depending on the size and complexity of the project. With most VR and AR projects it’s the reverse, with the addition of trying to problem solve using skills that are either new to your team or non-existent yet (Pro trip: YouTube is your friend!). However, similar to any good approach of putting together an SOW it’s all about doing your research, locking in the criteria of what success looks like and then adding some realistic buffer to offset the ‘all nighters’ you have to do in order to fix a bug that could ruin the entire project.
This all comes down to justifying the cost of the project against the client’s budget and perceived vs actual value they’re receiving as a deliverable. With little-to-no metrics or industry use cases that demonstrates what a ‘successful’ VR or AR project looks like for the Fashion and Retail industries it’s down to you to build a business case that makes sense to the client. We’ve found that can be achieved by working backwards from how many people they client is hoping to reach (market size) with the project.
The reason we focus on reach is because it’s actually fairly easy to make rough estimates around business assumptions that can still prove useful and accurate to the use case we’re building, for example if we’re pitching:
A consumer facing home VR experience
We’d estimate the potential user base for each potential platform:
- 1.1 million Rifts
- 1.35 million HTC Vives
- 3.35 million PSVRs
- 2.35 million DayDreams
- 8.2 million Samsung Gear VR headsets
We’d also discuss the challenges around distribution either through the Oculus Home store and/or Steam which effects the potential target audience.
It’s also important to stress that even those these are estimates on number of headsets sold, that doesn’t reflect the number of active users. Here’s a link to a very interesting Voices of VR podcast that goes into this further.
In-store VR installation
The equation we like to highlight in this use case is:
Duration of experience + Time is takes to get people in and out of the experience / Hours of operation
So if the duration of an experience is 10 minutes and it take about 5 minutes to get someone in and out of the experience, that’s about 4 sessions per hour (and that’s being optimistic). Let’s say the installation is in a store that operates from 9am — 6pm that means at most you’ll be able to get 36 people through the installation. You would then multiply that by the duration of the campaign.
If anyone has been to or seen a VR installation they’ll attest to the fact that the organization is still a bit of a mess (a more accurate assessment is that it’s a shit show). You either have people in line for ages without any clear idea if or when they’ll get a chance to experience the installation or people have hacked the ‘sign up list’ approach by running around every installation at the start of the exhibition and signing up for everything.
Mobile AR
Given that we would have already touched on the difference between tracking marker based AR and more modern mobile AR, you can explain how most modern day smartphones are reachable if you integrate the two technologies into the app.
So if you use something like Vuforia, AR Core and AR Kit you can essentially target most modern day smartphones.
At this point in the pitch, hopefully you would have layered some rough metrics around the business mechanics of the potential project. The additional benefit of defining Accessibility is that it it really helps to identify some realistic guidelines on what’s feasible for the client by eliminating the avenues that are not realistic. At the moment, and from our experience, this means that most VR projects are pretty much non-starters because of the limited number of people it can reach in the Fashion and Retail industries. Even if we were to achieve large amounts of publicity and/or push the campaign on social media the value in what we would have built in VR doesn’t translate very well because you have to experience it in VR. Case in point, ANY advert for VR.
Just to reiterate, this is purely based on our own experience and the angle in which Code & Craft is approaching VR and AR experiences for the Fashion and Retail industries. There are a few well documented successful VR experiences in the space, typically around furniture and training.
With all that said, this is how we explain why we at Code & Craft are primarily focusing on mobile AR experiences. We feel, at least at the time of writing, mobile AR offers the optimum balance between Immersion and Accessibility for the types of experiences we’re focusing on developing for the Fashion and Retail industries.
Immersion: Due to the fact that we’re focusing on primarily hero assets i.e. a core 3D object in the scene, we can bump up the resolution of those assets and not have to worry too much of balancing out the optimization between the hero asset and supporting assets e.g. backgrounds, environments, props, etc. This allows us to achieve a photo-realistic quality level of our assets which we know is fundamental for the Fashion and Retail industries. With the release of AR Kit and AR Core we’re also able to render true-to-scale objects with no tracking markers so users are able to experience products just as if they were in a store or walking past a store window.
Accessibility: By targeting mobile AR with a combination of tracking marker based AR and modern mobile AR technology we can target pretty much most smart devices. Obviously there are some considerations around the User Experience but these are all very solvable challenges. I think one of the biggest strengths for mobile AR is that it reduces the barrier to entry for users to try out an experience because whether you’re talking about VR or AR, seeing is believing. This also translates to reducing the barrier to entry for companies because the metrics become a lot more workable when establishing an ROI. Lastly, due to the fact that we build our mobile application using a game engine such as Unity, it’s much easier to publish to multiple platforms from one core code base which can bring the cost of app development down considerably.
I started off this blog post saying that 2018 is set to be another roller coaster year because I started to draft this post on a flight in early January, it’s now the end of March! I can’t believe how fast time is going and in turn how far we’ve already come. Fortunately, everything I had planned to outline in this post still holds true, if anything I’m even more certain of the value this framework provides. I believe that by simplifying a very complicated topic through the lenses of ‘Immersion’ and ‘Accessibility’ allows you to get to a point whereby you can begin discussing important questions such as what’s the actual experience supposed to be, does this makes sense to do in VR or AR, etc.
Hopefully some of you will find this framework helpful and get more VR and AR projects green-lit so we can all benefit from the type of traction we know if coming… just around the corner… maybe around the next corner… but it’s coming!
