How can 360 degree videos impact your life
Autor: Fred Neumann | Publicado: 2016-10-20T17:23:00-02:00



Tiny Toronto is a Toronto based company, specialized in design fabrication of attainable housing. As a solution to reach their target audience more comprehensively, the idea of using 360 degree videos seems adequate. As it's a new solution for creating additional housing space and reducing stress and cost of comute, 360 degree videos can help them immensely in their goals of establishing themselves as a successful startup.
One of the advantages they will have using a 360 degree video as a tool will be to help their potential clients to visualize what use they could do of their free space. If a traditional video would be used, it wouldn't be able to scale precisely the area available to put a "tiny house" on site.
Here are 4 companies making a good use of 360 degree videos for different reasons:

1) REI

The outdoor gear company REI created a 360 degree video campaign to help "multicultural millennials" to expand their view of where the outdoor starts and stops. With that initiative, they were able not only to reach this specific goal, but also to reach 1.5 million Facebook users. Such numbers are definitely powered up by using this type of videos, instead of the traditional ones.




Image source: REI's website screen shot


2) IC Real Tech

Another company using 360 degree videos but as a way to promote sales of its gear is IC Real Tech. They have partnered with Google to integrate YouTube 360 livestreaming capabilities into its ALLie camera. They also avoided being limited to YouTube users, as they also allow users to post 360 videos of their cameras through Facebook's 360 video platform. The other side of their business which also must be considered is the virtual reality headsets. Their cameras supports all available head sets, including Google Cardboard and Facebook's Oculus Rift.




Image source: Fortune website


3) Nescafé

After seeing "millenials" sharing clips using only cups as instruments, Nestlé launched a 360 degree video campaign as part of their REDvolution identity, ensuring a global look and feel across all their products sold in the 180 countries where they are located. They have released two 360 degree videos, as they had launched a previous video on their south american coffee plantations.




4) North Korea

Photographer Aram Pan went to the spotlight after releasing a 360 degree video on how's life in Pyongyang, capital of North Korea. That's a subject that attracts curiosity of many people around the world, and he had the help of this tool to draw attention to his work and to his YouTube channel.


As any other tool, there are pros and cons of using it in your strategy. Here are some of them:

PROS:

- You can definitely say that it's more engaging than traditional videos. As it's quite a new tool, everybody wants to check how is it. And brands can take advantage from that.
- As it's such a new technology, you can establish yourself as an innovator, using 360 degree videos to do live sessions of your events, for example.
- even though it's something that's only available now to the masses, anyone can assess this technology.
- before the adoption of 360 degree videos, the only way to discover if that college course you want to go next year had a good and modern building that fits your expectations would be through photos viewing, videos, and content available in apps and websites. With the option of using 360 degree videos now available, a college can provide its future students a full and rich experience of what it is to be on a day-to-day basis in that environment




Image source: www.makeuseof.com

CONS:

- you will not find the best quality in 360 degree videos, when talking about "image quality". So, for those brands and professionals that give "quality" an enormous importance and not that much importance to "being a pioneer", this tool may not be the ideal one.
- it's still too expensive to buy the best camera to record 360 degree videos. Which means it's not universally popular as an option to record videos. And well, high price doesn't mean good quality. yet.
- even though brands can use their financial power to create great 360 degree videos, for users creating 360 degree videos through apps that's not an easy task, as it's incompatible to some social media tools, such as the most popular one: Facebook. Which means that it's still not a too attractive option to users interested in using this tool.

After considering these pros and cons, we must also consider the 360 degree videos as its importance for global advancement.

- brand universe immersion: Star Wars fans can now experience speeding across Jakku's desert on Rey's Speeder. Which means other brands can also make use of it to position their clients even more deeply inside their brand's universe.
- surgery advancements: now it's possible to stream surgeries on 360 degree videos, which means that medicine professional can use it to improve many aspects in their professional tecnhiques. Also on medicine, it started being used to help treat depression.
- natural disasters most compreehensive perspectives: NGO's have already used 360 degree videos to document landscapes for free and public use, in ordet to understand and help the humanity to be more aware on how to deal with natural disasters.

360 degree videos are a reality. We're probably witnessing only the beginning of what promises to bring us so many different uses and possibilities. Hope that's good news. We don't need another tool to be used and cause depression on its inventors, such as Santos Dumont's depression for the airplane use on the First World War.


Links and sources

- http://fortune.com/2016/04/18/allie-camera-comes-with-youtube-360-integration/
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/10-ways-vr-could-change-the-real-world
- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-insane-360-degree-videos-facebook/
- http://mashable.com/2016/07/22/360-degree-north-korea-video-tour/#TsYllK9Mj5qs
- https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/the-first-ever-360-degree-video-surgery-is-happening-on-thur
- http://digiday.com/brands/rei-uses-facebook-360-video-multicultural-campaign/
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160812073656.htm
- http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/33290531/mid-pacific-students-capture-3d-video-of-volcano-scape
-&nbsp;http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/11/12/nescaf-unveils-360-degree-good-morning-world-facebook-ad-create-real-connections
-&nbsp;http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-insane-360-degree-videos-facebook/