Video games. They’ve been with us since the late 1950s, believe it or not, although the first video game to gain widespread popularity was the tennis game, Pong, in the 1970s. Flash forward to today and video games are a $109 billion industry with more than 2 billion gamers across the globe. To put that in perspective, the movie industry makes just over $36 billion in yearly revenues. Games are big. And they’re not just for teenage boys anymore, as anyone with a mother hooked on Candy Crush will tell you.
In the book (or movie if you prefer) Ready Player One, the protagonist, Wade, puts on a pair of virtual reality goggles and a sensory suit, steps onto an omnidirectional track pad, and he is instantly transformed into another person and transported to another world. That is the promise of VR. We’re a little way from a complete transformative experience, which is why the story is set several decades in the future, but what’s possible in the here and now with VR technology is pretty amazing stuff in its own right.
Video as an advertising tool has been around for nearly 80 years. The very first TV commercial for Bulova Watch Company, which was 10 seconds long and ran during a Brooklyn Dodgers game in 1941, stated simply, “America runs on Bulova time.”