Making the Most of Virtual Reality

The team at Elara loves games, in particular, puzzles. Let’s face it, most of the projects we work on are massive puzzles that included prep work, sorting, building, teamwork etc. Not only are we motivated by the stunningly beautiful digital content we produce for our partners, our crew also wants to equip them with the best solutions and strategy to leverage their content. With over 18 years of experience in the 3D animation realm it was a natural evolution for our teams to dive into Virtual Reality. We were already producing stunning digital content, we just needed to figure out how to place that content into a virtual reality experience.

At its core, Virtual Reality is an exciting and engaging tool that makes it easy to draw in a crowd. Its ability to completely immerse its user inside of an interactive 3D environment allows us to create truly memorable content. However, supplying the correct content to the client’s audience is a challenge unto itself. Bringing the client’s vision to life is what Elara does best, and over the past two years we’ve identified several styles of successful and engaging VR content. Here are just a few examples of how Elara utilizes Virtual Reality to meet our clients’ needs.

Linear Experiences

Linear experiences are a simple and intuitive way of telling a narrative inVR. These experiences start their production cycle like any other traditional animation; with a script designed around delivering a clear and concise message. Once the production cycle is complete, these 3D animations find themselves perfectly at home within the realm of virtual reality. These high quality experiences can be utilized anywhere, bringing with them a new standard in visualization and interaction.

The new norm for our clients is to bring the viewer into an active and engaging environment, instead of simply watching an animation on a flat monitor. In this way, linear narratives act as the perfect bridge between traditional animations and immersive content.

Product Explorations

Virtual Reality offers us the ability to visualize advanced machinery, complex products, and massive environments within the confines of a 3D headset. In a lot of ways this process is similar to a demo showcase, which allows our clients to bring digitally interactive product samples with them to both customers and sales teams alike.

VR allows users to visualize and interact with any product in an engaging and realistic environment. Product explorations are perfect for devices of any size and complexity, allowing clients to showcase anything from the heaviest machinery to the tiniest of mechanisms with relative ease.

Learning Modules

An experience can be built with the express purpose of education and training. In these scenarios, the retention rates of users are crucial for our partners.

The models we create are structured in an episodic nature, making it easy for users to pick up right where they left off; ensuring we have an audience that is ready to come back for more.

Each chapter-length lesson can easily be accompanied by a quick “knowledge check” to evaluate the user’s retention of the material, allowing a proctor, trainer, or educator instantaneous access to a user’s progress. Elara believes Virtual Reality is a revolutionary tool that allows the user to experience and engage with subject matters inside of a distraction-free environment.

Building Blocks to Success

Linear experiences, multiple product explorations, and learning modules can be interlaced with one another to construct a stunning network of engagement. Once a client has assembled any number of these segments, the true potential of Virtual Reality is unlocked. This bustling core of activities strengthens the impact of the overall experience, creating a unique ‘hub’ of personalized content and messaging.

These big-picture ideas highlight the future of what Virtual Reality can do for companies. The beautiful nature of this process stems from its simplicity. As companies continue to push out content for this technology, they will begin to amass a need to centralize this content into a single location.

Here at Elara, we’ve blazed our own trail into this exciting new industry. It has been an fascinating journey so far, and our creative team is currently working with some really advanced technology. We find that most of our success comes from how closely we work alongside our partners. Many VR devs come from a background in video games, which can often cloud the purpose of an experience with distracting elements. With Elara, there are no enterprise VR experiences disguised as first-person shooters. Whether it is a linear experience, product exploration, learning module, or anything in between; we design each application to work best for our client’s needs.

Learn more from our Animation Innovations page.