Bertie Millis, Virtual Umbrella

Hello, I'm Bertie and I'm going to be talking about some of the lessons that we've learned from working in the industry for three years now. I'm going to start by saying that I believe in the power of virtual reality. I believe in its ability to tell stories, evoke emotional reactions and just genuinely change the world for the better and do amazing things. On your programs you'll see that it says Bertie Mills. I want to assure you it's Millis. You can tweet me or tweet at me with Bertaroo or at Virtual Umbrella. You're guaranteed to get at least one like and one retweet from my mum, which is always a plus. So Virtual Umbrella, why did we choose VR? We went into the virtual reality industry and started working with developers, content providers, hardware manufacturers, the whole virtual reality ecosystem because we really had a passion for this. I did marketing in a virtual reality company. My business partner was in the same job in a different company and we were like, this is going to be huge. I don't want to be tied to one company. I want to be part of it. I want to help as many people as I can because if this industry is going to grow, we've got to help more than one person at a time. So what's a better motivator to grow alongside a continually advancing industry like betting your career on it? If VR doesn't go anywhere, I'm homeless. So it's a great motivator for me. Virtual reality is an exciting new medium, but we feel that it has to be done right. This isn't VR. Too many people think it is. The great thing about VR is there's no distractions. When you put someone in virtual reality, you have that person's full attention. Where else can they look? They can't look at their phone. They can't chat to the person next to them. They can't just drift off and start tweeting or thinking about something else. When you're in VR, all they can see is what you've put and they've put their trust in you to provide them content, provide them an experience. And everything that they see and hear is what is in your hands. So what do you do with that time and how do you be responsible with it? Just a fun GIF regarding being in VR and no distractions. So the reasons that we use VR. Coming back to my last point. Using your time effectively and responsibly. When people are in VR, they're essentially blindfolded and they are completely at your command. And the way that our brain processes VR, it processes it like a memory. So if I was to recall something to you, it wouldn't be, oh, I was sat in the cinema and I watched that film. It would be, I was on a mountain and a bear came at me. It's, I am in this place. I am in virtual reality. I'm in an environment rather than I'm over here and I watched it take place. You're an active participant. So my understanding is that the opportunity to really involve someone and really immerse people is something truly unique. The other great thing about virtual reality that we found is that this emotional reaction and this way that your brain processes it, you don't need to really create as much as people are thinking. So if you put someone else, you made someone watch a film for an hour, they'll come out. They might have a, they might have a little tear and they'll think about it for a couple of days afterwards. It will just be stewing in their mind. If they're watching a film for 15 minutes to half an hour, they can come out, but they'll be thinking about that for weeks. The way that it just affects them on like an emotional level and impacts them is always just so much deeper. And that's, we just found this to an awesome, awesome opportunity. An interesting fact is that only 11% of people have used a virtual reality headset. Virtual reality has entered the mainstream consciousness. Everyone knows what VR is now. It's quite rare. If you find someone, you go, oh yeah, I tried a VR headset the other day and they go, oh, what's VR? Everyone seems to know, oh, VR, you mean virtual reality. Yeah, we've all, we've all seen it on the news. We've all heard about it from somewhere. But the fact that only 11% of people have tried it means that we've got 89% of people that we can still show amazing virtual reality experiences to and make sure their first time is amazing. The possibilities are endless, but we have to create content that means something. The possibilities are endless. But does your idea work for VR? Just because you think it's a good idea doesn't mean that VR is necessarily relevant for it. I'm sure we've all seen examples of crap that's been shoehorned into a virtual reality headset because they had marketing budget or they thought it was a good idea. So you guys probably know that there's two types of content, really. There's 360 video and there's virtual reality. There's a very furious debate about whether or not they're the same thing, whether we class them differently. But I just wanted to show you this case. I'm going to show you this GIF, which I find really defines it well for you. So 360 video, you're passive, you're in one place, the environment envelops you and you can look around, but you can't move and you can't interact. Whereas virtual reality, normally created in a games engine or as of probably this month into the future, also with cameras, gives you that true freedom. It gives you freedom to go wherever you want. It gives me freedom to touch things and hope I don't break them. And I just think this is a really good way to create boundaries between the two so that people understand if you are trying something, it's not necessarily 360 video, it might be VR or it might not be VR. It might be 360 video. So I want everyone to have a better understanding of this industry. There's so many companies out there, there's so many people out there who go, oh, yeah, I could do VR or I could make a VR experience for you. But they've never done it before. There's a really good article that was out on LinkedIn a while ago, tied to a vlog. And it's called, I think, ago titled I'm not paying your agency to learn VR because there's so many people who are going we could do VR or we make VR and really they go yeah we've used unity once so I've got a 360 camera so so I can clearly do VR on a professional level and they're essentially using their budget to learn on the job and I just really want people to understand that you don't need to settle for that there are there are people out there who are a lot better at this who are learning it and if you are going to go with someone who is adept at it and not an expert don't pay them to do it that's that's their job their job is to learn it before they can really sort of deliver value for it this industry is always changing so here we have Facebook spaces which launched a day and a half ago and that's where I can put an Oculus Rift on I can be in my own virtual reality environment with with my avatar I can call someone and they can answer my call through Facebook Messenger on their phone so they can be holding their phone out with the face cam on it and I can bring that into my virtual environment so you can see here the bloke who's also using one of the new Facebook lenses the augmented reality lenses to give himself a nice colorful beard but he can see that and he can see your avatar and you can see him and it's really nice meld between reality and virtual reality and it's a way that we can really use VR as a communications platform moving forward also have a nice video about Facebook's new camera that they announced technically yesterday but it was about 2 a.m. here when it came out it was at the Facebook f8 conference or fake conference and it's a 360 degree camera that can capture six degrees of freedom leaving the rather than being in one place and looking around and not being able to move it and do anything this camera can be here but then in VR I can walk around that space it's a whole new way of capturing reality so if I press this button it should play the video or I don't even have to CEO and co-founder of otoy Inc today at F8 we couldn't be more excited to announce the results of an awesome partnership with Facebook around six degrees of freedom in video six stop video is designed to raise the stakes of immersion in video feeds now you have 360 video which many are familiar with but it's also a great way to start your day with where you can look around and see things all around you and you have stereo 360 which gives you a little bit of stereo 3d effects in each eye but neither of those formats allows you to actually walk or move through a scene and six Steve with that scene file you're able to then create a whole new experience or an edit or an interactive layer that is then compressed and processed and turned into an orbex media file with those pieces in place you can have an end and holographic ecosystem between Facebook Otoi and our partners, Toolchains. So once you have an Orbex scene file inside of an Octane integration... I'll skip all the workflow stuff. So the thing that's amazing about this is I can offer this roaming VR experience in places that I have been to. Imagine if I go to the Arctic, I go to the North Pole, and I put a camera there. I can take this, I can do this shoot with it. All that goes up to the cloud, comes down as the set file. I can then send that to someone, and they can join me. Or they won't be able to join me, but they'll be able to be there as well. They'll be able to walk around, and they'll have that sense of presence that you can't get from a traditional passive I'm stuck in one place, and all I can do is look kind of 360 video. So moving on to a couple of do's and don'ts that we've learned. So number one, if someone hasn't used VR before, don't put them on a roller coaster. Because this happens. And as you can imagine, I'm sure you'd be in the same situation. That's pretty traumatizing, isn't it? If you were that guy, do you reckon you'd put on a VR headset again? Because I know that I wouldn't. Creating a story that tells content. Sorry, creating content that tells a story. Say the words the right way around today. A story that your audience, buys into, needs to be something for them, and it needs to be amazing. And continuing that, the audience is key. You need to always be aware of what your audience wants. You can't go off and go, I'm going to create this amazing narrative's tale, or I'm going to create this amazing piece of 360. If no one is interested in it, or it's not made for them, and it's only made for you, they're never going to buy into it. And without creating content with our audience in mind, this industry and this ecosystem won't take off because people aren't going to buy into it. We've noticed that this has started to accelerate now, where we've got film studios who are funding the creation of branded 360 degree videos and virtual reality experiences. Rather than your traditional stuff, where it might be someone filming a mini documentary of them at the park, we're getting stuff that's backed by these film companies, and it's really real consumer aware pieces of content, things that consumers want and they're interested in. This experience changed my view on a product slash brand. So as I was saying before, this thing about when people try VR, it connects with them on a different level to a traditional flat media, and it connects with them on the memory scale. It makes them think of it and associate it with their memories. Imagine if you were that guy who was on the roller coaster experience, flying like this. Imagine if that had been a branded experience, say like for Coke. Are you ever going to drink Coke again without thinking of that or have that reminiscent back to you? And then on the other side, if you do something really mind blowing or something amazing, or if you introduce someone to virtual reality for the first time, and they're like, oh, wow, this is amazing. This could be the future. Whenever they try it again, they'll always have that association with your brand. And in terms of product awareness and trying to put a budget and a cost on how much that's good, you can't really. It's kind of lifeless, timeless. And it's lifelong. Most importantly, we found is that you have to make your user feel safe. They're putting their trust in you. They're wearing a blindfold, and they're allowing you to place them somewhere and place them in an experience. If you can't do this in somewhere like a shopping mall, if you're in a shopping center and you have people coming towards you like, hey, put this on, put this headset on. Trust me, it's amazing. They're going to be standing there. They might have their handbag. They might have their rucksack. They might have their wallet in their back pocket. You're not going to enjoy the experience. You might still do it out of peer pressure or guilt. But the whole time, you're not going to be thinking, oh, wow, this experience has really changed me as a person. You're going to be thinking, is my wallet still in my back pocket? Is my phone still in my bag? And this is just so important because people need to be aware of what you're doing. And the fact that you're covering their eyes and ears is just so huge. Because they are trusting you to be deprived of their own senses for this time frame that they're in your experience. The importance of audio as well. Someone mentioned this in the talk earlier, and it made me panic and add slides in because it was a really great point. So audio is a really huge part of 360 and virtual reality because you've got the visuals, you've got the technology, but without the sound, nothing really works. If I see something happening over here and I'm facing this way, but the sound still comes in both ears, the whole thing seems off. Without your binaural audio or without your directional audio, things don't seem to make sense. A really good example with directional audio I'm going to show you now. So Oculus Story Studio created a piece called Lost a while back. And in it, if you're facing this way, you'll hear a noise or a rustling to your right. And you're like, oh, what is that? And because it's only coming through your right ear or it's louder in your right ear than your left ear, you instinctively turn. And what do you see? You see this coming towards you, rustling through the ground. And if you're facing this way and it just been noise, you'd be like, oh, what is it? But because you've got that directional audio, you instinctively turn. Why would your consumer watch your VR experience? So this is more about the actual execution side of it. In my job, I've had a lot of brands, mainly things like charities, come to me and they've gone, we've had a production company and they've made us this amazing 360 degree documentary. And it's like a truly harrowing experience. It's something amazing. What do we do with it? They've done it for free or they've done it on the cheap because it's a charity. They haven't given any advice on what do you do next? Do I put this on YouTube? Do I take this out to the streets? Do I do an event? Do I do an activation? And that's a really key point on. Traditional traditional kind of distribution channels. What do you do with your experience once you've created it? This is kind of repeating the same point. How are you going to get this experience to your audience? So are you going to have a stall set up at a train station where people can come to you while they're waiting for their train and try it? Or is it going to be something that's available on Facebook 360 player or YouTube's 360 player? Content has to feel like it was created for them. So traditionally, I say traditionally originally virtual reality game back in 2014. It was very male orientated from where it had been from a games background. And three of the main players were all guys were really interested in video games. But we're starting to see as time goes on, we're starting to see content that is created for certain demographics. Or. Certain user groups and certain audience groups. There was a piece recently created by the BBC called No Small Talk, and it was a talk show in 360 aimed at women. And they were like, oh, we're just going to do this as a test. And it went down really, really well with their audiences. And it was the first time that this really, really large female demographic who are interested in VR or wanted to be a part of the VR industry have gone. They've actually considered us. They haven't just gone, oh, here's an idea. Let's do it. They've gone. What are we going to do? That's going to be tailored to this audience or this gender. And creating content isn't just the end of your journey. So you still need your strategy for VR. A lot of these times, VR is part of marketing budgets or it's part of a PR push. But what do you do with that? You can't just go. We've got this great idea. We're going to make this great VR thing, and then we're going to try and figure out our marketing around it. Everything's got to be part of this initial strategy. This whole big idea. They are virtual reality experiences. And having a having a VR activation as part of a larger campaign for your brand or your product won't work unless it still ties in with everything else you're doing. So what are the next steps for your company? Do you create something? Do you start working on your strategy? Do you start looking into different platforms and products right now? There's so many opportunities, and it's just endless. And the possibilities are endless. And you should really just start looking at it, even if it's never going to be something you do. Just as a. An opportunity. What are the chances? What could we do? What are the opportunities? Cool. And that's my that's my time. This is my company. Virtual umbrella. Tweet me, email me or just go to my website or email form doesn't work. Lovely. Thank you.