How AR and VR Are Transforming Video

Think about the first time you put a filter on a picture, or added text or a sticker. Suddenly, that image said so much more—it added texture, feeling, emotion and context.

Augmented reality adds contextual data on top of the image or video you’re viewing. If you're wondering how it's used in daily life, look no further than your phone. It's the dog ears on your best friend and the sports score beneath your brother.

Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), the tools that people have to express themselves on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger have evolved into more personalized systems. By combining our ability to recognize the content of imagery and videos using AI with the power of augmented reality, we are empowering people to express how they feel and add another layer of meaning to what they share by creating richer visual content.

AR Studio enables anyone to combine data and design to create immersive and animated effects. AR Studio is open to our entire community, so now everyone from brands to artists, musicians and politicians can create interactive experiences that are limited only by your imagination and require nothing more than a smartphone.

But filtering and augmenting our world is just the beginning. If augmented reality is about looking through the lens of our camera, virtual reality is about stepping into the world within the camera.

Through the use of a headset, virtual reality takes people into a fully immersive, interactive 360 degree virtual environment. Advancements in graphics and optics have allowed creators to build virtual worlds that are visually arresting, familiar and wholly engaging. Through the use of products like Oculus Touch, people can experience “hand presence,” and are able to move around in and interact physically with virtual spaces.

VR is adding a new layer of richness to storytelling, and powerful storytelling can lead to understanding even the most foreign experiences and cultures. Clouds Over Sidra, the first VR film ever made for the UN, follows a twelve-year-old in the Za’atari camp in Jordan–home to 84,000 Syrian refugees. It follows her to school, to her makeshift tent and even to the football pitch. After all, nothing drives more empathy than putting yourself in someone else's shoes. This type of experience doesn't even require a headset, it can be watched in News Feed and it's compelling in a way that no still image or linear video can replicate.

It may be a while before VR is mainstream, but here are some ways you as a marketer can experiment with these new technologies.

While some businesses are working with studios like Felix & Paul and Framestore to develop rich VR experiences, you don't need a special skillset or large budget to start creating your own. WebVR offers a more approachable and affordable way for brands to start experimenting with VR.

New tools are making it possible for businesses to build a single interactive 360 experience that can then be viewed online or through a VR headset. WebVR and Javascript allow web developers to build these experiences easily and at a lower cost. For example, Sony Pictures developed an interactive 360° video scavenger hunt to celebrate the launch of their new film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. In a storyline that mirrored the film, fans could experience the world of Jumanji and follow characters through a series of tasks to learn more about the film and get a sneak peek of the set.

Over the past decade, we've moved from a text-based lexicon to an image-oriented one, and are now currently shifting from static imagery to immersive experiences, starting with 360 photos, interactives and video, and eventually extending into full virtual reality. As marketers, we encourage you to start envisioning how your brand will fit into this new dimension of storytelling. Consider what challenges VR could solve for your business and how your brand can become part of the virtual world. Brands like KFC, NBA and Audi are already building VR experiences to engage followers, and you too can start experimenting in these spaces today.

As always, we aim to create products tailored to the way people like to consume content, and we are committed to innovation in an effort to provide the most valuable experiences for people on our platforms. We updated our mission to go one step further than connecting the world—we are now focused on building communities. Shared experiences are the foundation of all communities and we believe that these immersive technologies, AR and VR, create an opportunity for us to partner with you in this mission as we build the tools you need to build communities.