Fully immersive virtual reality environments are the next media space that will produce another generation of winners and losers in the race to provide the best, quickest and most engaging information. Which news organizations will win?
Their past performance is worrisome; the internet and its democratic system of links gutted well-funded newspapers. In the internet’s early days, news firms struggled or outright failed to bend the tools of capitalism toward financial survival in an information environment which, in an ongoing challenge and opportunity, defeats the concept of scarcity and destroys economically constructed distribution monopolies.
How will media companies fare in these new virtual worlds? Before it’s too late, news organizations should at the very least follow Visionary VR’s lead with its Mindshow product.
Mindshow provides simple tools to construct VR experiences. It would be amazing to see a suite of VR templates for the provision of news, from environments to props to avatars, that begin to build our shared cultural vocabulary around digitally constructed realities. Starting now is imperative — I suspect wearing goggles (or flicking on some embedded biological switch far in the future) will quickly become the norm over flesh-and-blood reality.