Like anything in life, some types of tech are more appropriate in certain situations than others, and one size almost certainly does not fit all. To decide what will have the most value and impact, it’s super important to think about some key things right from the beginning - message, audience, location, reach and budget. Let’s take these one by one!
Message
Sometimes the message you’re trying to convey will push your technology decision in a very definite direction. For example, if you need your audience to experience something from the first-person perspective and land a strong emotional impact, then VR will often be more effective than AR. If you need to convey a direct and curated message in your VR experience, then 360 video or animation is probably going to be more effective than a free-form experience. However, if you want the audience to explore and interrogate, then a fully interactive virtual experience would be more appropriate. Similarly, and in the same vein, AR often works best when you can set your message in context with a real-world situation or location, for example, dropping a virtual piece of furniture in your own home to see what it would look like and if it will fit where you want it.
Audience
You may feel that message and audience are basically the same thing, but in the context of immersive tech they are actually a little different. For example, how tech-savvy is your audience? For an experience intended for use at home, is your audience even going to have a capable device, let alone know how to access the experience and get the most out of it? If your experience requires downloading, will they have an internet connection? I’ve lost count of the number of times a client wanted to build a WebAR visitor experience at a site with no Wi-Fi and no cell service. How much time will your audience have to view your experience, and can you effectively convey your message in that time? This is particularly important for high-throughput environments like trade shows.
In the case of AR, you’ll find that users are much more willing to try experiences ‘ad hoc’ when they are WebAR, and thus the perceived hurdles to download and access content are fewer. But something like an AR car demonstration - where you might want to be able to show hundreds of option combinations, accurate paint finishes and lighting, or have one-tap access to brochures - will typically work better as an app where you can have a more premium user journey and much more functional depth.
Location
Which brings us to location - this is a big one. Are you planning for use at home where the audience can access your experience or content from the comfort of their own sofa, or are we talking about a busy trade show environment where you’ve got to get several hundred people through it? Or is this a sales tool where a confident sales rep will use your experience to seal the deal in a business meeting? Or maybe this is an FMCG campaign piece which will be triggered from a bus shelter or a retail POS stand. Perhaps this is a piece of premium content to support a product launch party and will be used at the top of a skyscraper at night. All of these different scenarios will open and close opportunities for different types of tech to work well and be effective, and it’s knowing and understanding the intersection between the tech and its best-fit use cases which should guide and drive the decision.
Reach
I’ve alluded to it a few times already, but reach is a key factor. Do only a few people need to experience the content in a controlled environment, or do you need to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible? Do you need people to access the experience from their own devices, or are you providing the kit for them? Do you need to repurpose the content so that it lives both as an immersive experience but also as content more generally accessible on a website, and will the message work across both settings? How does social content sharing factor in, do you need people to share? If so, you’ll need to consider the visuals of how people interact and engage with your experience.
Whilst VR is cool for the person using it, it’s less interesting for other people to stand and watch. And if it’s VR which is intended for use at home, then it’s a sad reality that not many people are going to have the VR hardware, making your potential audience very small. Almost everyone has an AR-capable device these days, and WebAR will have a much, much wider reach, but the tech is still somewhat limited in what it can do. With interactive screens, you're relying on your audience to come to you, but there are ways of building in social sharing mechanics, and sometimes that's the entire point of that type of experience anyway.
Budget
Lastly, there is the sticky question of budget. Certain types of tech are generally more expensive to create content for than others, but it’s not always so clear-cut, and new technologies are aggressively reshaping production workflows at the moment. All the factors above will have an impact on the production budget, so it’s critical to think about all of those aspects in depth and decide what is an absolute core concern vs what is a secondary goal or a nice-to-have.
In summary
Hopefully, from reading this, you can see that choosing the right technical delivery for your project or campaign requires careful thought and consideration in order to maximise what you’re trying to achieve. We can help you pick your way through these questions (and the many more besides) to get the right answers and deliver an experience which gets your message across to your audience effectively and on budget.
