It's a testament to the industry and the professionals working in it that video games are at the forefront of this technology as well as making it available to the common citizens. It's been less than two years since the current version of VR was made available and one of the most popular ways to access it is via the Sony PlayStation VR platform. When it was first released in 2016, Sony found themselves in a quandary; how do you advertise and communicate a sensation unlike anything the public has experienced before?

In communicating a sensorial experience, metaphors and creativity are the two most commonly employed. What does a certain food taste like? "It's gritty with the consistency of peanut butter but has an after taste like and onion that stays on the back of your tongue." …while this type of explanation might work for gustation or any singular sensory exposure, VR is a complete immersion of multiple senses to the point of tricking the mind. Sony turned to BBH of NYC to help launch their promotion for the PlayStation VR. BBH has an eclectic group of clients, many of which are found in the online/tech sector. Their premise was that the trailers and commercials needed to convey how VR affects your body, making you a better gamer. To communicate this visceral and visually motivated experience, the spots would need to use a great deal of post-production effects.

Actual footage from Sony PlayStation VR was augmented to create a surreal perception by viewers of the campaign. Fluctuating between super slow motion shots outside the body and time-lapse shots inside it, accented by sound design, the use of macro lenses to create a hyper shallow depth of field, and intricately designed/choreographed camera manipulation; all of these components transfer an understanding of how one's own body might react to VR.

Melanie Roy oversaw the post-production process for the Sony PlayStation VR spots. She relates, "We treated these games not just as a visual spectacle but as a full body experience. What starts with your eyes becomes so much more as we explored the reactions that occur inside one's body. The most exciting part was that we got to interpret this world in an artful way; suspending the notion of reality in service of creating the coolest, most visually stimulating thirty seconds. Our goal was to create a visual chain reaction that corresponds directly to the physical actions happening within the game."

While the experience of Sony PlayStation VR is groundbreaking, perhaps the most intriguing aspect is that the VR format is still in the single digits in terms of age. If you compare the internet of the mid-late 90s to that of today, it's awe inspiring to consider what another decade or two will manifest in the world of VR. It's a certainty that the culture which Sony PlayStation and the gaming community have cultivated will be a driving force in this evolution.