Dive Brief:
- Mobile device and virtual reality (VR) hardware tech firm HTC and Condé Nast Traveler China partnered for what a company press release describes as the first augmented-VR reading experience, which appears in the publication's December issue.
- The AR/VR content will take advantage of HTC’s Vivepaper technology to offer readers an AR-enabled booklet they can interact with using a cardboard viewer or HTC's Vive headset.
- Vivepaper tech enlivens editorial content and provides marketers with new types of advertising, per the release.
Dive Insight:
While augmented and virtual reality technologies have begun to hit their stride this year, there have not been a lot of examples of their use with print content. Making content jump off the page sounds interesting, but it is also reminiscent of how publishers embraced QR codes several years to bridge print and digital content. In the end, the friction level was too high and the added value too low for widespread use.
What could be different now is that the success of Pokemon Go has carved a path that marketers can follow to tap into AR marketing, and among other VR news Juniper Research predicted earlier this month that VR hardware spending will top $50 billion by 2021. Condé Nast isn’t the only publisher jumping on the VR bandwagon. USA Today Network announced last week that it is producing a weekly VR show sponsored by Toyota.
"Vive has been leading the VR market in innovation and, with this announcement, we are the first to demonstrate the merging of VR and AR technology onto a single hardware platform," said Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC, in the press release. "With Vivepaper, we will enable the millions of books, magazines, newspapers and periodicals that have existed throughout history to come alive in the virtual world. We are so excited to have Condé Nast as our launch partner and look forward to having all their amazing content available to VR users around the world soon."
What remains to be seen is how consumers react to AR/VR content for one, and then whatever form of advertising formats are created to match the innovative technology.