The Future is Prolog: Virtual Reality

You walk into the building through a revolving door and look around. In front of you, there’s a long, spare hallway painted in pure white, with mahogany doors alternating left and right. After walking to the third door on the left, you open it and step into a corner office with a minimalist desk and huge windows overlooking the ultimate metropolitan vista from the 40th floor. It’s your new office. Like it?

Press another button and you’ll find yourself in front of a small, freestanding building surrounded by tall trees and a small brook running alongside. Step inside and be greeted by dog wandering free in an office that’s located in an old home complete with a salon/library conference room, offices in what once were bedrooms, a kitchen that was always a kitchen and the ambience of a successful entrepreneur. Does this suit you better?

In the near future, while you’re working at home in your pajamas and fuzzy slippers, your clients will be able to visit you in-person, in real-time and online, seeing only the images of your style or projections of yourself that you want them to see. You may appear in any setting as a 6-foot-tall, blue-eyed movie star or as a three-headed dog like Cerberus, if you need to command some extra respect.

William Gibson, the cyber-novelist, described virtual communities and virtual reality long before there was a Sim City or Second Life. In his books, the varied virtual verisimilitudes merge with life in a way that makes them both indistinguishable from reality and impossible to live without.

The implications are fantastic. As business people, we will no longer need to meet at Starbucks or “free wi-fi” hotspots and video-conferencing will soon seem crude when compared to a virtual conference where we appear as ourselves, sitting around a conference table with a 360-degree view of the room and access to all the paperwork – all from the comfort of our beds. Better yet, no one has boarded an airplane, rented a car or slept in a discount motel.

For retailers, the possibilities are even more incredible. When a youngish male enters the online store environment, the colors may be dark and bold, the music could be loud and strident and the product line will reflect a man’s sensibilities. But when an older woman enters the virtual store, the colors will be more elegant, the music more sensual and the items displayed will represent her past purchases and taste.

Today’s predictive models and cookies are just a taste of what we’ll see in the next decade. In the same vein, it’s no wonder that some advertisers are finding their ad budgets aren’t yielding the right results when all they use is the tried and true media. Marketers have to do a better job explaining the future to their clients who want to stay ahead of the curve. And brand managers have to understand where the future is headed.

Webinar, anyone?

Steve Brett

58 Advertising

Copyright 2008