27 August 2022
What’s the difference between a 360 degree experience in VR and a 360 degree rendition on your laptop in 2D?
You may have seen 360 degree renditions recently on your mobile or laptop in online shopping sites where you can use your mouse to drag the item you are thinking of buying to be able to see all sides of it. This helps to give you a better idea about the object, whether it is a pair of shoes or a piece of sculpture. This experience is nothing like a 360 experience in a Virtual Reality Headset!
To begin with, the 360 Degree Experiences you can book in these categories have been filmed with 360 degree cameras in real life. Which means that you are immersed in the centre and the video happens all around you, as if you were there in real life. With 360 renditions on a 2D screen you are an outside observer, sitting at your desk or looking at your phone.
Secondly, you may have been led to believe that all VR experiences happen in a metaverse of animated space, with 3D objects like spheres and cubes floating around in a cartoon-like, immersive, non-real, avatar-inhabited, imaginary reality. This can be the case with some scenarios. You, as an avatar, meet up with others, also avatars, in rooms that have been designed to look familiar, but are not. These scenarios can be useful and one gets familiar with inhabiting this type of VR world to be able to play VR sports, have business meetings, collaborate in 3D design prototypes and many other different scenarios.
But 360 degree experiences are different. They happen in the real world.
We have got so used to watching movies on our TV screens and other devices that when we watch these rectangular 2D surfaces our mind imagines them in 3D and we can follow the characters and share their experiences with them. We also do this with still photographs, see them in our mind as 3D.
Apparently, when the first photographers showed their photographs to others they couldn’t see them properly. People had to be trained to understand 2D objects as representing 3D ones. The same thing happened with the first moving photographs, films. Yet now our minds have been trained to translate 2D into 3D we spend many hours of our waking lives doing exactly that, looking at 2D devices and enjoying the stories that they tell us about the 3D world we live in.
The problem is that we remain one-step removed from the screens we watch. We remain ‘outside’ the action. We sit at our desk or on our sofa and the action takes place on a screen some distance away from our bodies. It’s amazing, when we come to think of it, just how we can forget this and become absorbed in the action that is taking place some distance from us.
However, when we actually experience 360 degree videos using a VR headset for the first time we realize how much more real things become when we are ‘immersed’ in the action and we can look around and see that we are at the centre of the action. This is how real life is. We are there. We experience the world and the actions that take place in it as someone who is at the centre of the action. We no longer have to imagine anything. It is all around us.
Categories 5 – 11 have been provided for you to break free from your imagination and fully experience what it is like to really ‘be’ somewhere real. Perhaps you would like to visit Marrakesh and feel what it is like to walk around the Souks, seeing all the street vendors displaying their wares, interacting with the snake charmers and the acrobats. How about being surrounded by a string quartet, playing just for you, getting so close that you can see their fingers touching their instruments as they charm you with a piece by Schubert. You will feel that they are playing just for you, and they truly are. It feels so special.
How about daring to join a couple of wing suit flight enthusiasts aboard their Cessna as they prepare to leap from the plane above the mountaintops and be the one holding the 360 camera so that you get, literally, a bird’s-eye view of your companion’s flight, dodging the peaks and making a soft landing, exhilarated and glad to have succeeded. You may not ever want to take that risk yourself but now you really know what it feels like.
VR truly liberates us all from having to imagine what it must be like for actors and real-life celebrities. We can all get to travel, take part, share, experience the world we live in. Why not give it a try here and book for one person?