We can expect to see a diverse range of headsets introduced by major players like Google, Samsung and Google Cardboard alongside an influx of affordable options from China. As most of us cannot dedicate a complete room in our homes to VR, many of these new viewing devices will utilize your smartphone for seamless delivery of experiences.
Last Thursday, we released the first episode of our weekly VR show VRtually There where we partnered with Toyota Camry to introduce our first “cubemercial” -- an ad unit native to VR that was built by our in-house product team. The series will introduce new episodes on a weekly basis across USA TODAY NETWORK properties, our USA TODAY app, VR Stories and on YouTube. We will provide advertisers with post-campaign analytics including consumption metrics and information about whether their ads were viewed with sound and in full “VR” as opposed to “360 video” mode on non-VR devices.
Here is a snapshot of our path to launch. The past year has been filled with experimenting, learning, failing, honing, seeing things differently and bringing marketers along for the ride in Virtual Reality at the USA TODAY NETWORK. The journey with advertisers really began at CES this January in Las Vegas where we met with dozens of brands, showed them our early concepts, solicited feedback, listened and used the conversation to evolve our thinking and to inform the shape of our virtual storytelling content and ad products.
In Cannes for the Advertising Festival this June, we learned that consuming VR while having a glass of rosé could be fun (kidding!) and shared our learnings and experiences with more marketers. We received coverage from our meetings in Cannes, which you can read