The InstaVR team had the pleasure of speaking on February 28th at the Ricoh Theta Unofficial Guide Meet Up on the campus of Stanford University. The event, attended by both students and VR enthusiasts in the Silicon Valley, was a great opportunity to discuss the possibilities of making VR apps without any specialized knowledge. The accessibility of the Ricoh Theta S and InstaVR has enabled both consumers and professionals to create awe inspiring immersive experiences.
Our Head of Sales & Marketing, Andrew Woodberry, gave a talk entitled “Making Money With VR“. The focus was on the emergence of VR as a major technology platform, and how to leverage that to build a business. We have many customers doing that today with nothing more than a Ricoh Theta, a laptop, an InstaVR Pro account, and an internet connection. These businesses cross different fields, from real estate to marketing agencies to production companies. The one thing they have in common is a recognition that VR can help a company stand out.
Below are three main takeaways from the talk:
1. People Love VR, But They Don’t Know How Easy it is to Make
At the start of the talk, Andrew asked the audience how many of them had created a VR app before. Only 2-3 hands went up. He then asked how many people had used a headset to experience VR. Virtually every hand went up.
The enthusiasm for VR is real. But there’s a lack of awareness of the ease of creating VR with a platform like InstaVR. Most people don’t realize they can create an app and submit it to the iTunes and Google Play Store in a matter of minutes.
With InstaVR, creating shareable VR applications is as simple as creating a web page on a CMS system like Wix. It’s all drag-and-drop with no coding knowledge required. By the end of the night, everyone was convinced they too could create a VR app in minutes, and possibly leverage that for business purposes.
2. VR is Applicable in Many Industries
We’re constantly amazed at all the great use cases for InstaVR technology. At the talk we met with a diverse array of people, including a person who works for the Navy interested in putting together training apps, two representatives from a major Japanese media organization, and a new-to-VR enthusiast who created a very immersive pumpkin patch video using the Ricoh Theta.
Since we’ve had over 12,000 people sign up for our platform, we know that the interest range is broad. But meeting prospective and existing customers always ratchets up our enthusiasm for the future of VR!
3. There’s a Lot of Cool Uses for the Theta S!
Normally, when you think about the Theta S, you think about putting it on a tripod or selfie stick. That works great for doing a quick tour of a college campus or capturing the rooms of a house for a real estate app. But there are a lot of other cool & unconventional ways you can deploy a Theta to capture images and video. Jesse Casman, who co-manages the Unofficial Guide, detailed some of them in his presentation which you can see here.
One way is by attaching a Ricoh Theta to a drone to capture aerial views. I can imagine a lot of use cases for this — training, security, marketing — just to name a few. There is also software that will allow you to livestream to Periscope using your camera. The number of peripherals will only accelerate over time, meaning the unique apps you can create on InstaVR will proliferate as well.
We had a great time at the Unofficial Guide’s Ricoh Theta Meet Up and look forward to working on more projects together with their team. If you’re new to VR, the Ricoh Theta is definitely a camera worth looking into.
