Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

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Neil
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Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by Neil »

I was watching part of Tron Legacy as a rerun the other day, and I got hit with an Oculus Rift TV / Internet commercial idea. I'm sharing it here because maybe it's good enough to use. If it is, hey! It would be cool if they could contract me out to produce it, write it, or whatever. I just think it would be a fun thing to do.

Now...you have to visualize....

Do you remember the scene in Tron Legacy, where right after Kevin Flynn leaves his young son's room, there is a montage about him disappearing? "Kevin Flynn, CEO and video game entrepreneur has disappeared....gone missing...world in distress...etc.etc". There is this whole montage of news broadcasters talking about the terrible loss it is, etc.

Wouldn't it be funny if the same thing was done, except it was John Carmack who disappeared. The montage would talk about John's work in gaming, Doom, Quake, a private space program, etc.etc... a big mystery disappearance and scary music...

Then it cuts to John playing with the Oculus Rift in his messy basement, with his wife yelling for him to take out the trash already. Something like that.

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Neil
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by 2EyeGuy »

Sounds good. I don't know how easy it would be to pitch it to Palmer Luckey though, since he might be tired of John Carmack accidentally taking all the credit despite his best efforts not to.

Advertising 3D, or virtual reality, or even just televisions, is always hard. Maybe they should copy the advertising technique of those Sharp Quattron TVs with 4-color channels (which actually seems kind of pointless except perhaps for anaglyph or chromadepth 3D)...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcXPwM03x2k[/youtube]
...and get someone from Star Trek (Next Generation, DS9, or Voyager though, for the holodeck references) to talk about how they can't actually show you what it's like.
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Neil
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by Neil »

Actually...that's the beauty of it. In this case, John Carmack IS the customer (so it inadvertently solves that problem).

This is just one idea though. Perhaps there is a thread opportunity here. What is the best way to market VR and immersive technologies like 3D so people actually get it?

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Neil
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by MSat »

John Carmack *IS* the biggest reason for the success of the Rift, IMO.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by 2EyeGuy »

MSat wrote:John Carmack *IS* the biggest reason for the success of the Rift, IMO.
He is certainly a big reason. But John Carmack's own HMD designs were failures, and he couldn't come up with the elegant and workable solution that Palmer Luckey did. Carmack hacked a tracker, but they're not going to use it in the dev kit, did great publicity, and made good Rift support in Doom 3, including things like low latency, warping shaders, laser sights on guns, and the neck and head model for head position based on rotation.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by Owen »

Carmack was only working on the problem for a tiny fraction of the time Palmer spent tinkering. He also helped Palmer refine his design. He turned a rough proof of concept into something that was demo-ready.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by SouthernCross »

Owen wrote:Carmack was only working on the problem for a tiny fraction of the time Palmer spent tinkering. He also helped Palmer refine his design. He turned a rough proof of concept into something that was demo-ready.
Either way, I have to thank them both.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by Endothermic »

2EyeGuy wrote:Maybe they should copy the advertising technique of those Sharp Quattron TVs with 4-color channels (which actually seems kind of pointless except perhaps for anaglyph or chromadepth 3D)...
Actually the Quattron having Yellow is far from pointless and has a big (potential anyway) market which from all the advertising i've seen Sharp have never even thought of.

Deuteranopia (red-green colour blindness) specifically the green kind where you have no green cones at all (or exteremely weak not just weak ones) is a huge market for that TV. Apparently 6% of american males have it (even if they don't know it) and the majority of those have full blown Deuteranopia where they have no green cones (green light sensors) at all or they have them but they don't work at all.

People that don't have green cones obviously can't see green light so instead just see white. Those people while they can not see green they can see Yellow although it's not quite as good as normal vision they can still see and tell Yellow fine. But on a TV thats using Red+Green to output yellow (even though our eyes only have RGB that percieve Yellow what we see from actually looking at yellow wavelengths and looking at Red+Green approximating yellow is quite different) they don't see the yellow very well (it's more browny then Yellow and not as vibrant and depending on the shade of yellow and object, if they don't "know" that its yellow they won't in fact think it is but will think it's a light brown).

Although there's still no Yellow in video media and these TVs just make the Yellow from the RGB data they still actually output Yellow wavelengths of light and these colour blind people can see that Yellow almost as well and vibrant (vibrant for them anyway) as they can in real life.

There is a lecuturer at UCBerkley (or use to be) can't remember his name but he did some lectures on the "Letters and science C70v - physics for future presidents" lectures and he has this colour blindness himself (he always thought the walk signs to "go" in NY were green not white (they were white when he was young anyway) since they looked the same colour as the "go" light for cars which was always called green) and in some of the videos of the lectures he talks about it and gets asked about the Quattron and says that alot of normal vision people can see "some" improvement with the TVs however people with this type of colour blindness see an "incredible" improvement.

So untill they start putting Yellow in the video media these TVs may be kind of pointless for normal vision people but for people with Deuteranopia especially severe Deuteranopia then it's like WOW!!!! instead of pointless, he rekons if anyone with the colour blindness actually looked at a Quattron they'd never purchase another model of TV unless ofcourse it had Yellow as well.

I'm guessing maybe it's 2 - 3% of american males that would see the really WOW!!! improvement (while the remaining 3 - 4% would still see great improvement) and while that doesn't seem like alot that is only males (females cna have it though a much lower number) and only in america so you can bet world wide there would be a huge number of people that would see a vast improvement if they looked at a Quattron.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by 2EyeGuy »

I get that yellow pixels emit new wavelength that isn't emitted by red or green pixels (at least I assume that's what happens). Which is why I said it would be good for chromadepth glasses which use prisms to refract different wavelengths different amounts. RGB yellow looks blurry through chromadepth glasses since the red and green parts are seen at different depths, but if you use a yellow pixel it would be clear and at a single depth half-way between.

That sounds good about colour-blindness, but I don't get how they can see yellow without green cones. People perceive yellow when both the red and green cones are stimulated equally. People see white when the red, green, and blue cones are stimulated equally. People see green when the green cone is stimulated slightly more than the red cone (they have overlapping sensitivities).

I made a dos driver to address red-green colourblindness once. I made it make the red channel of any game pulsate so it would look different. I have no idea how well it worked, since I didn't have anyone with colourblindness to test it on, and didn't know anything about the details of colourblindness, and never released it.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by rhinosix »

It's a nice idea. I was thinking the larger gaming population won't know who Carmack is - but you resolve that with the montage.
Still, I guess people who know who Carmack is are on the ball with technology and have already been following the Kickstarter campaign.
If you're thinking of a commercial for television then you probably want to be going after other markets.

The larger problem I see from your ad is that it might not be clear what the product actually does.

I love thinking about advertisements for products too. Some basic ideas I just thought of:

Start in an first person view - the inside of a craft in Space, a planet comes into view, burst through the atmosphere, land in the middle of a battlefield, jump out, shooting, running through forest, leaping across gaps, etc. The view turns around just in time to see an enemy blast the player right in the face. Cut to a living room. The player takes off their Rift, and hands it to their friend and says "Your turn." Finish with the OR logo and slogan "Step into the game."

After people know what the device is, you could do more abstract and metaphorical advertisements. Maybe where kids are zipping up into suits of different game characters with the slogan "Who do you want to be today?"

Or you could make "the Rift" a place where you can go. Like a fantasy building with a lot of arched doors where you can step through into all kinds of virtual worlds.

Or maybe a "call to arms" advertisement, with a monologue spoken by a revolutionary type character before heading into battle. Show men in their 30s doing mundane tasks, getting chewed out by their bosses. Kids on dirty trains repetitively tapping away at a touch screen game. Teenagers playing generic first person shooters - easily racking up kills, but not having much fun.

The monologue would say something like:
"We were told we could become whatever we wanted. Go into Space. Discover new worlds. We'd have flying cars, jet packs, robots, hoverboards, virtual reality headsets.... But what happened? We got regular jobs, regular mortgages, and regular cars (cut to a guy kicking his old car). The future passed us by. Many people seem to have forgotten that old dream - or maybe they never had it... Well, I'm here to tell you that it wasn't forgotten. Some of us have been hard at work - building, testing, tweaking. Today, some of those old dreams start becoming real. The future... starts now."

Cut to someone slipping on the Oculus Rift. Intense music builds up showing a rapid succession of clips from different games - characters shooting, jumping, virtual hands spinning a 3D object around then selecting "Send to 3D printer", watching films in a virtual cinema, building a robot in a virtual environment, inside view of a cockpit as a shaking rocket breaks through the atmosphere. And finish with the logo.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by MSat »

That's not to take away from all the hard work Palmer (and co.) have done, and this level of success may have been achieved one way or another, but it probably would have not been this quickly. Everything came together at the right place and right time.

I think an effective commercial would be an actual person running around in a game world with normal clothes, and a Rift strapped to their head. They then end the game, and start playing a completely different one.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by cybereality »

They should just play this video (from the 2005 Doom movie) and then show the Oculus logo at the end:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLUtrXsXhU[/youtube]
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by mahler »

rhinosix wrote: I love thinking about advertisements for products too. Some basic ideas I just thought of:
[...]
Dude, you have talent!
It almost made me want to pre-order another one :D
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by android78 »

cybereality wrote:They should just play this video (from the 2005 Doom movie) and then show the Oculus logo at the end:
I'm not sure how much they would have to pay the movie studio for that. ;-)
I actually thought the doom movie was a good bit of fun, and not half as bad as the critics all seemed to make it out to be. It wasn't life changing, but well worth watching.
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by Endothermic »

2EyeGuy wrote:People see green when the green cone is stimulated slightly more than the red cone (they have overlapping sensitivities).
Even with green cones how do normal vision people even see yellow....... since red+green doesn't make yellow it just makes this mucky brown colour but if they are both there in high enough percentages it then somehow transforms into yellow :P There's alot more to how we see colour then just the cones picking up light and because colour is only percieved there's still no way to really say if the colour you see is actually the same as the colour I see.

Anyway back to how green colour blind see yellow thats one of the reasons since even without green cones the red ones still react to some of the wavelengths that the green ones would react to but then you have the question of do they actually "see" the "colour" yellow or is it that they can just tell the difference between yellow and white compared to green and white which in this case look identical and they can not.

I've seen rendered images showing what normal vision looks like and what someone without green cones would see and the only thing missing is green and the yellow looks dull and a little brownish but i can't see how they can really know thats how these blind people see the colour yellow (when they can't even say if what you see as yellow looks 100% the same to me), all they can know is that they see something as opposed to green where they see nothing.,

So as far as TV with yellow pixels go green colour blind people I think still probably can't see the "real" colour yellow (as far as what we determine the real colour to look) but what they see on the TV that's yellow now looks almost identical in colour to what they see in real life that is that same colour yellow compared to RGB TVs where what they see on TV as that yellow looks like a different colour/shade to what they see in real ife as that same colour.

Anyway onto the topic I think something simple and a bit corny could work well for a RIFT commercial. Maybe have it open on Capt Picard, he walks into a holodeck and the doors close then he says "computer, oculus rift" and one appears on a table in the middle of the holodeck. He walks over pics it up, looks to the camera camera and says "enough said" then fades to black and up comes oculus and the step into the game moto or whatever :D

Sure its not the holodeck but you know what its going to do/try to do and i'd crack a smile if that's all Picard did and said
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Re: Oculus Rift Commercial...What do You Think?

Post by wuliheron »

I think something like a Star Trek holodeck theme would be best, but like the TV show sometimes did make it clear nobody is quite sure if they have ever left the holodeck. :)
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