PlayStation VR: How video games are leading the charge towards the future of Virtual Reality?
Virtual Reality (VR) is an exciting and new concept for people. Our greatest view into this, and the most accessible view, has been in the world of video games.
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.
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