Thoughts on Virtual Reality Marketing?

Your writeup is well done.
Two of my favorite loves are VR and marketing. Both combined can create some amazing results. Siemens recently created a VR experience that shows x-ray views of working machinery to better explain their manufacturing process.

Ideally, I see VR marketing eventually growing beyond the convention floor to infiltrate the office space for a more direct, one-on-one or group experience. I also see VR as the next form of conference call, multiple client avatars sitting around a virtual presentation or touring a virtual facility.

We have been looking into tying VR and customer experience together. For instance, our company does a lot of work with Sitecore's Experience Platform. Extending that technology into VR, we can begin to infer what people are most interested in based on what they pay the most attention to.

Imagine if a user is presented with a mall full of stores, but they are really interested in red shoes. Both the stores and the customer would benefit if each store put its selection of red shoes in the window. The stores and customer would further benefit when stores that do not sell red shoes put clothing and accessories that would complement red shoes in their windows.

The issue is that often the customer does not really know they are looking for red shoes at the time they begin shopping. Further, in the real world, the store has limited window space so they must try to attract a wide range of customers.

In VR, both of these "problems" can be solved by having the mall dynamically populate the windows based on what the customer shows an interest in. Showing interest can be based on things like scanning past similar items, looking directly at an item, picking an item up, examining the product's details and price. Once an interest spike is determined, virtual workers can be seen scurrying to the windows to put up similar or complimentary items.

Further, tying this into historical data - you can identify trends. For instance, people who are initially interested in red shoes often buy blue or tan shoes. Presenting these options earlier on could help the customer make a decision sooner; saving them time.

This could eventually lead to people wearing a wider range of fashions because they see a wider range of items that are catered to their real interests. A virtual shop that delivers in 2 days has a lot of supply-chain flexibility to stock a much wider range of products.

Edit: I meant to put this link in: http://www.popsci.com/eye-tracking-menus-let-you-order-pizza-telepathically
This system does not use VR, but it does make inferences based on subconscious feedback.

"andrewtek" wrote:
We have been looking into tying VR and customer experience together. For instance, our company does a lot of work with Sitecore's Experience Platform.

This is very interesting and I think has a huge degree of development potential for the future.

Do you encounter difficulties with running VR applications within a Corporate environment and their notoriously locked down, often outdated and add-in-unfriendly systems?

andrewtek said:

We have been looking into tying VR and customer experience together. For instance, our company does a lot of work with Sitecore's Experience Platform. Extending that technology into VR, we can begin to infer what people are most interested in based on what they pay the most attention to.



Imagine if a user is presented with a mall full of stores, but they are really interested in red shoes. Both the stores and the customer would benefit if each store put its selection of red shoes in the window. The stores and customer would further benefit when stores that do not sell red shoes put clothing and accessories that would complement red shoes in their windows.

We are a Sitecore company (TechGuilds.com) and we actually did exactly that! We just launched a product to make Sitecore the very first VR/AR Enabled Enterprise CMS / Experience Platform.You can now leverage the power of Sitecore Marketing and content authoring in the VR environment using out of the box Experience Editor and Content Editor. 

If anyone interested in a demo let me know.

Nabil
Delivery Director, Co-founder, Sitecore MVP,TechGuilds 

T: 647-317-4118 ext. 101
211-5353 Dundas St W, Etobicoke, ON M9B 6H8