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Now is the time for business leaders to experiment with virtual reality tools, which could enable enterprises to tell creative stories that connect with new audiences and customers.

At Vrse and its sister company, Vrse.works, we create fully immersive 360-degree video and virtual reality (VR) cinematic experiences. But really, we tell stories. And every story should (and does) dictate how it ought to be told. Naturally, we’re staying up to date on new advancements in technology and the great work other people in the field are doing. But we can’t wait around until all the bumps are smoothed out, and neither should you.

VR as an artistic medium—and, increasingly, as a tool for innovation in business, health care, and other areas—is in its first growth spurt, and we’re proud to be adding to the innovations. We create and pioneer a lot of the technology we use, and every progressive iteration is inspired by a storytelling choice. We like to take on challenges and find creative solutions. Mistakes tell us as much as successes about the future of VR.

Our first foray into VR was the “Sound and Vision” experience I did with Beck a few years back. We wanted to reimagine the concert and create something organic and inclusive. Traditional concerts are a battle: The audience faces one way, the band another, and sound clashes in the middle. Video captured this brilliantly for years, but we wanted to try a different shape—the circle. The concert-going experience, we thought, should evolve with the way we’re capturing it. The event was billed as an experiment in immersion, so my ultimate goal was to capture and preserve the moment for a later broadcast in VR. This was more than three years ago, though, and VR mostly only existed in research labs. Luckily, this was right around the time technologies were being developed to support VR experiences. The result is what the viewer experiences in Sound and Vision: fully immersive 360-degree virtual reality, captured from various perspectives, painting the full portrait of the experience rather than just tightly squeezed snippets.

I’ve always been interested in the intersection between emotion and technology. Studying people’s experiences while inside VR gave me the idea to bring like minds to Vrse. We’ve found that VR, when exercised with precision, can tap into a viewer’s sense of empathy. VR can bring you closer to someone, or someplace. In short, VR is a teleportation device. Instead of just showing you a conflict, it can take you into one. It can bring you face to face with a child in a refugee camp or a band on a stage, and the emotional response has measured similarly to actually experiencing those interactions. As part of the United Nations experiences we’ve created, UNICEF has taken to the streets with VR headsets in an effort to raise money for faraway causes. When people on the street experienced VR, they were twice as likely to donate—and we’re talking monthly donations, not just one-offs.

We’re continuing to create stories in VR that mean something to us. We’ve had the great fortune of caring a whole lot about every experience we’ve put out, and we want to keep that going. We want to keep re-evaluating how people experience familiar stories.

And you? Now is the time for exploration. All previous art forms were built on mounds of trial and error, and VR is no different. Sometimes storytellers need to travel down the long and winding road a hundred times in order to find the highway.

—by Chris Milk, co-founder and director, Vrse and Vrse.works

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