Andy Hood Talks Oculus Rift

AKQA's Nick Turner has already explained the need for car companies, and brands in general, to rethink the way they aproach design and the interaction they have with their customers.

The agency's work with Nissan at the Tokyo Motor show last month was a new way of approaching co-creation and audience interaction. Here, AKQA's executive creative development director, Andy Hood, delves deeper into what the Oculus Rift is, how it was used for Nissan and what potential it has.

Tell us a bit about Oculus Rift, what it is and how you came to be using it?

The Oculus Rift is a head-mounted virtual reality device, offering a fully immersive experience. It was funded through Kickstarter and we were one of the earlier backers there. 

Kickstarter is a great way to find new innovative technologies that may provide creative solutions to the problems we look to resolve, for a few hundred bucks we can get early access to prototypes and find ways to apply them far beyond the original intent, sometime before they become commercially available.  This was how we first discovered and came to work with the Oculus Rift.

What excited you about the prospect of working with this technology?

Working with any new technology, device or medium is always exciting, and opportunities to really break new ground and provide experiences people have never had before do not come around every day. 

To be working in this new medium on what is effectively Day Zero for mass market fully immersive VR, and to be leading the way in applying this technology beyond gaming, is the kind of thing we live for. 

We see Oculus Rift not merely as a new device and an amazing experience, but as a completely new way to connect people to objects, locations, times, and if you can’t get excited about that then this is not the industry for you.

Why is it such a step above any similar technology that already exists?

The Rift really delivers on a promise of VR that goes back many years, but it’s only the recent innovation and enhancements in rendering, sensors and display technologies that make it practical. 

Timing is critical when it comes to innovative product launches – the technology needs to be there, people need to be ready for it and there needs to be an appetite to support it beyond the company who launched it. In the case of the Oculus Rift it would seem that all these factors have combined to maximise its impact.

The product has been developed by gamers but did you immediately see the potential for its use with and for brands?

With any new technology it is vital that we look beyond the obvious and see how it can be applied to solve different kinds of problems for businesses and consumers, or how it can be combined with other technologies to open up avenues that might not have been immediately apparent. 

We obtain the earliest prototypes of new technologies that we can and investigate them not so much from a technical point of view, but from the point of working out what its role can be, what problems it can solve and how it can be relevant to people and businesses beyond being exciting new gadgets. 

We build our own internal prototypes to demonstrate cases and use these to help our people and our clients to understand how these new technologies can be applied to different scenarios.  With Oculus it was clear very early on to us that gaming is just the Trojan horse that will launch VR into the mainstream, but that its usefulness blows out far beyond the gaming world.  I believe that will be very important not just for our clients, and us but also for Oculus themselves.

How did you pitch the idea to Nissan and were they immediately on board?

We use the internal prototypes we build with new technologies to spark conversations with clients, and with our own teams.  In this case our team had been working on concepts for Nissan for the Tokyo Motorshow for some time that we all realised could be brought wonderfully to life with the application of the Oculus VR technology once we had worked with it for a while, and so a unit was taken out to Tokyo for Nissan to experience for themselves. 

The feelings invoked by the Rift experience combine perfectly with the concept of using your character and personality to design your Nissan IDx car, and this was very apparent to Nissan themselves, who were immediately excited by the possibilities. Nissan are all about “innovation that excites”, and the Oculus Rift is most certainly that.

It was a huge success at the Motor Show, why do you think that is?

I think there is a sense and wonder at being so completely immersed in a new world that is almost impossible with other technologies, it can truly feel like the imagination made real when done beautifully. 

People connect with that, you can see it on their faces when they use the Oculus Rift and are immersed in the experience.  It’s a basic human response.   Film studios have been trying to reach this by increasing the scale of the experience – huge screens, 3D, new sound systems, but the key to creating a truly immersive experience is actually in bringing it back to the personal, creating an experience you are part of, not merely looking at from the outside

What is the potential for future use of this tool?

Once you start coming up with applications for immersive VR it’s hard to stop.  The future uses are almost endless, and it feels as though there will be no facets of our digital lives that are left entirely untouched by it. 

If you see VR as a new medium rather than merely new type of display or a gaming mechanic, then it becomes clear that areas such as engineering, education, communication, exploration, architecture, design, health and entertainment are all fields into which VR is set to explode.