Building Worlds

The objective of Building Worlds; Creating an Affordable and Efficient Virtual Reality is to explore the phenomena of Virtual Reality (VR) through the marketing of its developing technologies, its future opportunities, and its potential of mass production. I spent the fall of 2014, gathering information on current VR and immersive environment trends. In the spring of 2015 I began analyzing the current market of VR and evaluating its advertising trends to explore the opportunities of VR in various fields such as education, art, psychology, and entertainment, etc. This thesis will offer a quick introduction to the history of VR and then proceed to analyze the market of VR during the '90s "Fall of VR" and compare it to the market of the present. I interviewed the nations VR pioneers and gathered from their discussions a set of strengths and weaknesses of current technologies. This thesis will combine this inside-industry perspective with an audience perspective (backed by market research) in order to study the present day market. Ultimately, these studies have revealed a change in target demographic and societal interest for VR. Through my industry studies, I can conclude also that VR applications in entertainment are the most influential and renowned in popular media, suggesting a change in current advertising strategy. This is supported by the conducted research that showed that the target demographic is unaware of the industrial uses of VR that have been extant for decades but very aware of the entertainment-based uses of VR.