Imagine your next vacation.
Roll out of bed mid-morning, rub the sleep out of your eyes from last night’s late night, and walk a hundred steps from your beachfront cottage for a quick dip in the ocean before that sumptuous breakfast.
Do you dive right in?
That’s the choice for local travel and tourism executives considering virtual reality—the digital aural and visual rendering of places or events that simulates a “you-are-there” experience.
It’s “immersive” by shutting out all other input—via goggles or a pitch-dark room—or in an entire theme park attraction by engaging other senses, like smell or touch.
Disneyland Resort’s under-construction Star Wars-themed land is expected to tap this technology when it opens in 2019; other Orange County hospitality providers are taking the plunge now … sort of.
Water Fine
“We wanted to dip our toe in the water,” said Charles Harris, Visit Anaheim senior vice president of marketing.
The destination marketer released a video in March of Anaheim Convention Center, the center’s Grand Plaza near Hilton Anaheim and Anaheim Marriott, the Anaheim Packing District food neighborhood, and Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center, a central people-hauling hub.
The video can be seen in any standard cardboard viewer with a slot to hold a smartphone; other VR video could require a formal headset, like Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear. The main element is enclosure: A user’s vision is focused completely on the screen and the scene, with external elements are eliminated.
Videos are shot with special cameras and the images are “sewn together” with software.
Marketing and public relations firm Idea Hall in Costa Mesa made the Visit Anaheim video. Senior Creative Producer Jeff Cole led the project, which was done in-house.
He used six GoPro cameras for the footage; immersive elements include what viewers hear.
“You turn your head and hear where things are coming from,” Cole said, such as the fountain at the Grand Plaza in front of the convention center and jazz music at the packing district.
First Looks
A second local destination marketer, Newport Beach & Co., expects to use a new 360-degree, VR camera for live streaming events and stock footage for marketing.
Doug McClain, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said VR works for a scenic destination to let visitors experience Newport Beach first-hand from their home before traveling.
“Seeing is believing.”
At least one individual hotel has joined the local work.
Irvine Marriott made two VR products, both backed by Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott International, that illustrate the range of possibilities with VR.
The property is a “proof of concept” site for its parent flag; Marriott has developed a reputation for new ideas—it runs content marketing in-house and its global marketing chief worked in digital media at Walt Disney Co.
“We love to experiment,” at the hotel said Matthew Harrison, front office manager.
The first VR effort is video of the lobby, public areas, amenities, and rooms, for Marriott to show big corporate clients through VR headsets like the Rift, while the second—smaller in scope and made with lower-cost equipment—can be viewed via an app called Matterport on a smartphone slipped into a viewer, as with the Visit Anaheim video, to let guests and clients “see” the hotel before booking or arrival.
The cost to corporate for the first effort: $50,000; the second came in at about $3,000.
So True
Video production folks are split on VR’s value—but in general are behind the push of a technology so nascent that were it a film we’d be watching the opening credits.
WorldStage Inc. in Tustin does audio, video, lighting and engineering for projects that include live events at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, NBA pregame shows and a visitors center at the Presidio National Park in San Francisco.
Chief Technologist Matthew Ward said VR clients include Louis Vuitton at London Fashion Week and Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines, wooing fans at a Dallas Cowboys game.
For the latter it created a VR viewing room that solved a time crunch problem—namely that most VR is watched by individuals in headsets, one at a time.
“If you are demoing something that requires a headset you end up with this long queue and people get bored and wander away,” Ward said.
WorldStage helped Carnival “create a hemispheric projection with 180-degree views,” meant for groups inside a domed, temporary structure, “like a movie theater or planetarium.”
Costa Mesa-based marketer IMW Agency thinks VR can work “for real estate clients and selling wedding experiences,” said Chief Marketing Officer Peter Bretschger. Content creator Digipulse Video Production in Irvine isn’t so sure.
Its recent work for a third local DMO, Visit Huntington Beach, included aerial drone footage—but no VR.
“Very rarely do clients ask me for this,” said owner Clive Tollman. “People aren’t that thrilled with it yet.”
Content Kings
Idea Hall’s Cole acknowledged, “people weren’t really asking for” VR from the agency but, “we’ve been watching it (develop) for a couple years and we think we’re ahead of the curve on this.”
He said “travel and adventure” hospitality stories lend themselves to VR and if a story integrates “great cinematography and production … (then) the cutting edge is the best place to be.”
The agency said costs run $50,000 to $100,000 for a VR video, depending on audience, cost of “talent”—narrators or hosts, for instance—equipment and the post-production process.
Danny Keens, a vice president at Newport Beach-based NextVR, which livestreams real-life events to VR devices, also crowns content king: “What accelerates adoption is great content experiences.”
To Last
A corporate component may also be key.
Irvine-based Eon Reality Inc.’s work includes virtual and augmented reality—computer images overlain on a camera’s view of the world, as in Pokemon Go. It’s crafted about 8,000 applications for clients, including a visitor video for a chapel in Florence and a baseball-training simulator for the Tampa Bay Rays.
“Our focus is B2B corporate training and knowledge transfer,” said Mark Cheben, Eon global marketing director.
Farther afield, last month the Paris Air show—where Eon exhibited—had displays from companies that included a VR air-to-air refueling simulator and training videos for technicians who work on Boeing 787s.
A June Wall Street Journal article said companies including Wal-Mart, the NFL, and medical and dental device makers are using VR to train workers and educate clients and end-users.
Five-year projections show “business demand will be the main driver” of VR content, the article said.
Visit Anaheim’s video intends to drive corporate travel—leisure clients will, for now, have to wait, Harris said.
Harris had Idea Hall shoot footage in 4K resolution and render, master and deliver it in 8K. The numbers represent multiples of the current consumer-viewing standard of high-definition or HD screens.
“Vimeo and YouTube both support 8K and the new iPhone is coming in September,” Idea Hall’s Cole said. “The cameras can do it so you just need the skill-set to create the content—the right tools for the right job.”
“The content is meant to last,” said Anaheim’s Harris.
