Virtual Reality is Making Big News.
Welcome to the blog page where Bullhorn Media focuses on the latest media industry news and major trends in media technology. We’ll be revealing the stories of how video technology meets marketing and how digital art embraces entertainment. This blog will be the page where we introduce you to new developments in our fast-changing media world.
Virtual Reality Puts Times Square Virtually Under Water
If you had been in New York City on July 11, 12, and 13, you could have seen Mel Chin’s Virtual Reality art installation “Unmoored.” You
Virtual Reality Recently Put Times Square Under Water. Art and Social Conscience met when augmented reality was overlaid on reality in NYC.
would have seen people walking around Times Square wearing “hollo-lens” head-gear and relating to VR things you could not see.
Artist Mel Chin mixed the reality of the Times Square setting with the Virtual Reality of an underwater world. People looking up saw dozens of boat bottoms.
They saw larger-than-life microscopic beings floating around them. Watery ripples and wavelets enhanced the under-water illusion.
Mel Chin used Virtual Reality to explore a “potential future where climate change has gone unchecked, and thanks to melting ice caps, erosion, and coastal flooding, Times Square is entirely underwater.”
How Virtual Reality Put Times Square Under Water
Mel Chin worked with Microsoft, to create this “site-specific app that allows guests to explore a submerged Times Square in an augmented reality experience.” The title “Unmoored,” creates the story of our future in a watery world.
“When guests looked up, they saw the “nautical traffic jam of boats bobbing 26 feet above them. This flotilla includes boats of all types and sizes, slowly making their way around existing buildings and landmarks.”
A Virtual Reality Art Installation Enhanced by Sound
As the boats bumped into each other, guests heard appropriately hollow, underwater sounds. Meanwhile, they also saw life going at its usual
Is Her Computer Interface really or Virtually Underwater?
Times Square pace.
Although it’s too late to visit the live show, there is an “Unmoored” app available for download and use in Times Square until September 5, 2018. Likewise, there’s a taste of the experience available at Google Play, but without actually being in the Times Square location, it’s not quite the same experience.
A Message Behind the Medium
Mel Chin, a well-known conceptual artist, has previously utilized all types of mediums to encourage public recognition of social issues. The Virtual Reality water scenario grew from his concern for climate change.
He stated, “I think the most important motivation as an artist is to use what James Baldwin has described as extracting the question that is buried within the answer.
If the answer is ‘The world will be inundated and destroyed by our own doings,’ then what is the question that we have to ask now? This project is about now.” – Mel Chin, artist
In A Galaxy Far Far Away, We Find Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality will greatly enhance consumer’s interaction with the Internet of Things.
This technology reminds us a great deal of an experience that is much closer to home, right here in Orlando. Now, some of you readers might have already guessed it. Disney World has a Virtual Reality Event they describe as multi-sensory, untethered hyper-reality adventure.” Indeed The Downtown Disney District has Star Wars™: Secrets of the Empire, a transformative story by ILMxLAB and The VOID that merges our world with virtual reality.”
As their advertising explains, “Surrounded by cutting-edge 3-D imagery and sound, Guests can move around freely while virtually interacting with popular Star Wars characters—as well as each other, under disguise in teams of 4—in a multi-sensory environment that combines groundbreaking technology, virtual reality and the magic of illusion.”
However, from our Orlando vantage point, we can certainly understand how the technology shocked and awed the Times Square crowd.
Virtual Reality and Marketing Adding To The Buzz
So, now you not only interact with the VR environment but with other real people who share the same illusion.
Adding to that buzz is the recent rollout of location-based Experience Centers. A start-up named “The Void,” in conjunction with Lucasfilm’s
Virtual Reality blends Art and Marketing to Create…. Money.
ILMxLAB has opened or is opening centers in London; Anaheim, California; Glendale, California; and Las Vegas.
Here is the biggest marketing twist Bullhorn Media sees:
- The retail mall property leasing giant, GGP, is opening the centers in Glendale and Vegas. And of course, they are establishing these Virtual Reality experience centers in shopping malls.
- Just as Nabshow reports, GGP has high hopes beyond the price of admission: “Offering participants premium content and a social experience in one, location-based VR can also reinvigorate mall spaces.”
- Savvy marketers have also figured out that a 15-second spot created with Virtual Reality would not work. You must be immersed in a reality, and that’s just not enough time to get immersed.
- However, a business could sponsor an event, and if a sponsor buys a content-rich environment and an addicting story, then profit should occur.
To this point, Nicholas Cooper, chief creative officer at VR kiosk maker VRX Networks, emphasized that the quality of content is key for VR arcades. “If you have a great social experience or a singular experience where you’ve bonded with the characters or the game, that’s what’s going to keep people coming back,”
Virtual Reality Centers Find Their Stories at the Movies.
The world’s largest movie theatre chain, AMC Entertainment, theaters, recently joined with Dreamscape Immersive, a startup specializing in
Virtual Reality, when it becomes the norm will also have many corporate, medical and educational uses. Here we see an architectural engineer using it to design a building.
location-based VR, to build up the Virtual Reality innovation.
Other investors in Dreamscape Immersive include Warner Bros., 21st Century Fox, MGM, IMAX, mall owner Westfield Corp. and Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg.
The Bullhorn Blast– or Our “Take” on the Virtual Reality News:
You can watch a video in your darkened living room or a movie in 2D, 3D, or Imax, but we at Bullhorn Media believe its value still all comes back to the story it tells. Whether we are shooting a corporate event or new product release, we will tell our client’s stories.
There was movie film, then videotape, and now we shoot digitally in a digital world.
But who knows? The future might take us all to Virtual Reality.
Until then, we tell stories, one digital video or photo frame at a time. Bullhorn Media thanks you for reading our news blog. And please check out the portfolio page before you click away.