360VR Fad phenom gimmick - hell no!
With the advent of consumer devices like the Samsung Gear, The Nikon 360 Mission and now the Garmin VIRB 360 auto stitched software for the home movie maker is a reality.
But why is there such a veracious appetite for immersive content?
Simply put, it is a truly all around experience where viewers can easily feel what's behind them below them and above them giving them the sense of wonderment and scale that staring at a screen head on so lacks.
After all the latest generation of college grads have been playing 360 games for a while - the advent of the PS4 Googles that can't be kept on the shelves is testament to that.
So for us old guys whose kids go dad buy me this $70 game for my console and we do just to get some piece and quite on the weekends - Suddenly find ourselves checking out the goggles and then hey presto it's game on. These same parents run marketing departments and are looking for the coolest and greatest ways to get client adoption and voila a 360 marketing campaign is in the works and the pitches start flying and so on...
Well, here is an example of the most utilitarian and industrial forays that love 360 Video and are using it to attract customers and industries to show off what it's like to spend time in their world no matter the industry.
Is 360 for everyone? It's too early to say. But as a small company we have worked for Ford using a Nokia OZO, we have done tourism work using our ZCam S1, and the work above for Seimens and APS, Now we find ourselves filming for car dealers, pool companies and even RV manufacturers using 4k video and spatial sound, homes and hotels are wanting this new medium - so yeah 360 doesn't appear to be the Betamax of 2017...
...Maybe one day we will be like this guy?