Even cows have VR glasses.
When the time comes to 2022, how can VR innovate? An unexpected direction is to let the animals VR up first.
Not long ago, there was a news report that a farm in Turkey put ON VR glasses for cattle and played pictures of the summer grassland, and it is said that the cows are in a better mood and the milk production has increased. In the latest quest 2 promo that has just been released, Meta let a dog wear a Quest headset and meet the band's old friends through Horizon Worlds (a virtual reality social platform developed by Meta).
As a more real person, I immediately wanted to know, what does the VR world look like in the eyes of animals? If this is true, will the livestock industry popularize VR earlier than humans? If this is a gimmick, what value can marketing with animals bring to the VR industry?
Perhaps walking into the animal world, everyone will find that this is the choice that VR suffering from "vision disease" has to make.
Animals + VR, is it necessary?
Putting VR on an animal is not such a novel idea.
As early as 2014, artist and programmer Austin Stewart proposed to bring virtual reality glasses to chickens and make them mistakenly think that they are living freely and happily in the barn. But the idea itself is a conceptual art project, more of a wake-up call and a reminder to the world that spending too much time staring at a screen is no different from a captive animal.
Therefore, VR is only a very futuristic entrance here, with symbolic significance. However, the time comes to 2019, the public is no longer unfamiliar with VR headsets, and the practical significance of wearing VR for animals has also begun to appear.
In 2019, a cattle farm in Moscow's Ramensky region announced that it would equip cows with specially designed virtual reality VR glasses to boost milk production. At that time, it triggered many reports from scientific and technological media at home and abroad. In 2022, Ukraine once again has the practice of letting cattle use VR to watch lawn milk production, and Meta, which bets on the metacosm, is promoting VR socialization from the perspective of dog hooks.
So, are they serious? As an honest person, I sincerely tell you that vr can't blind animals at all.
First, these experimental animals have different visual patterns than humans and require "animal-specific" content, which is obviously difficult. In the case of cattle, some media reports claim that the grasslands seen by Russian cows in VR are designed according to the characteristics of "the bull's eye is more sensitive to red in the spectrum, and the perception of green and blue is weaker", but scientists have long proved through experiments that the cow's eyes have no cone cells, can only see black and white, the so-called "red susceptibility", in fact, is provoked by the back and forth is the swinging cloth. As for the dog hook social in the Meta propaganda film, it is also not in line with physiological logic, although the dog's eyes have cone cells and can recognize some colors, but the number is much less than that of people, so the dog can only see a small number of colors, can not see red and green, but also myopia. A dog-oriented TV program channel DogTV, the picture has also been designed accordingly. So, when humans don't have much to see in VR, will someone bother to develop VR content for dogs?
Second, the existing VR equipment also does not conform to the face shape and field of view of the above animals. In order to cover the two glasses of the cow, the farm directly put a human VR glasses on the side of the cow, and one of the frames hit the forehead of the cow, which also looked lonely. As for the dog's glasses, although the eye distance may be adapted, the dog's real field of vision is actually much wider than that of a person, with nearly 240 degrees, even if it can really adapt to the vertigo caused by VR rotation, the 360-degree experience is probably dispensable.
Of course, you might say that this is an advertising idea, and it doesn't have to be so true. But these ideas have led to the next question: why does VR develop to the present, but still rely on "strange tricks" to attract attention, but there is no word-of-mouth marketing out of the circle?
Step into the animal world, vr illusion and reality
Is there a serious application of VR? Yes, and a lot.
South Korea has a variety show through VR, so that mothers can see the children who have passed away, it is simply a tear gas artifact; academia, using VR to treat depressed patients, through immersive comfort and being comforted to release emotions, many people's symptoms have been significantly alleviated; during the epidemic prevention and control period, a VR company has made a VR version of more than 1,000 scenic spots in China, allowing people to travel all over the country without leaving home; as an alternative to part of the believers' remote prayers, VR is also very popular in India...
These applications are realistic and humanistic, why do they not appear in the promotion of VR manufacturers? Is this that people are inferior to dogs?
There is a possibility that the general public is not the crowd that VR manufacturers want to impress.
This Spring Festival, I did not go into the cinema to watch the Spring Festival stalls, but watched a VR movie that won the "Golden Lion Award". The 50-minute experience made me feel like a needle in my throat. On a review site, I also saw a lot of ordinary viewers, and the message sent out a similar feeling of view and aftermath, and these represent the key to VR's entry into the mass market:
1. The content is not high enough. After paying a ticket price of nearly 200 yuan, a large number of pixel blocks and textures still appear in the film, and compared with the flat film and television that has reached 8K, the appeal of consumer-grade VR content to C-end users is seriously insufficient. It may be that in order to avoid the interruption caused by the audience's misoperation, the interactive experience of the film is very small, almost only a small number of operations such as touch and rotation, losing the unique experience advantage of VR.
2. The equipment is still chicken ribs. Of course, there are still many VR players who are reluctant to watch public films, but instead buy THEIR own VR equipment to play games such as "Half-Life", and Oculus is gradually becoming cheaper and lighter. However, the experience of wearing dozens of minutes still has a limited viewing angle, only about 90 degrees, and the obvious border greatly reduces the sense of immersion; the weight is larger and there is a sense of vertigo. It's hard to imagine ordinary people using it for long meetings, offices, fitness, entertainment... Without killer devices, those "killer apps" naturally become rootless trees.
Obviously, animal marketing is not trying to answer and persuade people to ignore the above real-world problems.
Many netizens, after watching Meta's latest promotional video, were actually "anti-marketing", saying:
"Real copycat bands perform better than virtual utopias";
"Once the virtual reality headset battery is depleted, the e-dog will always see only the darkness";
"This ad made me realize how good my life is. I don't need a virtual world where I can escape reality to be happy. Thank you metavalse! ”
Who is such impractical and counterproductive marketing for?
There is a category of people who should like this kind of propaganda. And they may be the most initial group in the technology adoption lifecycle curve that Meta wants to capture— the "early adopters."
This group of people has three main characteristics:
1. Visionary, who may be a tech fanatic or expert, who follows and pursues new trends in the tech industry, and likes to be the first person in the social circle to buy and try them out;
2. Exemption, as the first person to eat crab, does not care about the functionality of new products, has a high tolerance for the defects of new technologies, and sometimes deliberately buys some immature products to explore;
3. Influence, as a minority of people in the crowd, their active discussion can keep the attention of new technologies, and the reference opinions given can often influence the purchase decisions of mass consumers.
How cool and incredible does it sound to have cows produce milk, let dogs socialize, and let chickens get drunk and dream of dying, just like "Wild Ultraman"? There is no 4P, obviously can not promote any sales behavior, there is no follow-up implementation of control and other measures, almost throwing out a "VR is cool" and "the future needs VR" concept, and then there is no then.
Visionary disease, can not promise VR a future
Visionary groups can contribute early revenue to VR vendors and help them attract consumer attention to VR so that they can make a difference. But there is a fundamental difference between the VR that the general public wants to experience and those who are tech fanatics.
The prospects for VR do not depend on whether the technical concept is cool, whether the theory is true, whether the analysts' predictions are reasonable, but on the upper limit of the value that can be delivered.
Animal marketing is only superficial, behind which VR is currently unable to open the bridge between technology and the mass market, and suffers from "vision disease" in advance. It is manifested in the fact that although it conforms to the foresight of technological development and the trend of the times, it is difficult to make progress and the road ahead is confused. This is often because the progress of those related industries is ignored.
Taking AI as an example, as early as the 1980s, there were software programmed with neural networks, but it did not achieve commercial success at that time, on the one hand, it did not find a unique and attractive application scenario at that time, and compared with other commonly used software, there was no special advantage, and it was ultimately not accepted by the public. The rise of this round of AI wave is directly related to the growth of computing power and the accumulation of big data.
Today, although the price and threshold of VR are declining, and the NUMBER of VR content on the Oculus platform has exceeded 600, there are still many industrial constraints:
1. Calculation.
The more accurate the picture of the headset device, the more dependent on the rendering power brought by the powerful computing power, which cannot be solved by the technological development of VR manufacturers alone in the context of the scarcity of chips in the world. Next, perhaps we will see VR manufacturers and mobile phone manufacturers, like mobile phone manufacturers, embark on the road of joint customization research and development with chip companies to form a differentiated product experience and competitiveness.
2. Production.
Another problem restricting the development of VR is that it is necessary to create a set of software and hardware systems for video producers to shoot, render, and design, and the closure of the hardware system, the high cost of learning, and the unclear prospects of accounting have caused producers to be unwilling to invest a lot of energy to create. Driving the content ecosystem requires lower threshold production tools and exciting profit-sharing policies to make creators profitable in the ecosystem.
Products are the cornerstone of marketing, with animal protagonists, showing the potential of VR immersive experiences. However, without the core products that impress the needs of the mass consumer group, without the product innovation that spares no effort around this group, engaging in some gimmick marketing will only make early adopters and mass consumers suspect that their IQ has been insulted.
Can VR smoothly transition from the early market to the mass market, enter the "niche country", first bid farewell to the "vision disease", and start from the bits and pieces rooted in the industrial chain.