The Oculus Go from Facebook owned Oculus VR is hardly the first standalone VR headset to hit the market, but its high-quality build and affordable price make it the first HMD with truly large-scale marketing potential. A successor of sorts to the Oculus powered Samsung Gear VR, the Oculus Go combines all of the Gear VR’s best features into an economical all-in-one package. Where the Gear VR required a compatible Samsung smartphone, the Go includes all the necessary hardware within the headset itself. Starting at just $199 for the base storage model, the Go finally makes VR marketing a feasible option for companies of all sizes.
High-End VR
While large companies have already been putting VR to use for branding, design, marketing and more, they’ve been forced to rely upon expensive tethered headsets. These PC connected devices are capable of delivering truly incredible immersive experiences, but their cost can often be prohibitive. Even if your business has the budget for a $1,500+ VR setup, these systems are too large and complex to deliver anything other than stationary location-based experiences. For certain scenarios, this may be the perfect solution, but it’s rarely an option for those looking to reach a wide audience.
Budget Solutions
On the other end of the spectrum is cardboard/paper based VR experiences. These relatively primitive types of projects represent most people’s first encounters with VR. By providing a simple cardboard based headset that users assemble themselves and insert their phone into, brands have been able to distribute virtual content on a massive scale. While cardboard-based VR campaigns have the potential to generate significant buzz, their quality pales in comparison to most other headsets. If you’re looking to build a direct mail type of VR marketing campaign, cardboard is essentially your only option, but for anything else there’s almost certainly a better solution.
Oculus Hits The Mark
The release of the Oculus Go in Spring of 2018 finally filled the large void that existed for a mid-range VR HMD. While the high and low ends of the spectrum have had their headsets for years, there hadn’t been an effective solution for arguably the largest portion of the market. While the Oculus Go is largely marketed as a consumer device for playing simple games with mostly cartoon style graphics, it’s potential goes far beyond that. At Pixel Framers we’ve managed to push the capabilities of the Go to its limit using the latest cutting edge rendering technology. While it’s still not quite possible to achieve the same level of quality one might see in a PC based tethered VR headset, the results are remarkable. We’ve managed to achieve near photo-realistic quality in our architectural visualization projects for the Oculus Go. Rather than being tethered to an expensive PC in a single office building, these high quality experiences can be sent around the world to investors, potential buyers, and more at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.
Although the Oculus Go represents a major step forward for enterprise VR technology, it may not always be the best fit for your specific use case. At Pixel Framers, we have experience developing content for every major VR platform, so whether you’re interested in developing content for one specific headset or a cross-platform application targeting many, we’d love to work with you.