I had a very strange virtual reality experience yesterday, and the more I think about it, the more it fascinates me. Now I wouldn’t call myself a VR veteran – normally when you’re at a trade show such as MWC and there’s a VR experience to be had, there’s a 2-hour queue to go with it – but I have managed to grab maybe half a dozen VR sessions over the past couple of years, involving flying, exploring strange galaxies and shoting down aliens. And all of them have been great fun, really enjoyable, left me walking away thinking: How did I feel like I was flying when there was no 4D element, like wind in the face or movement of the chair I was sitting in to create that illusion?

And then there was the VR experience I had yesterday at an IAB event with a company called Vibrant. They were exhibiting at the event, which was focused on native advertising and content marketing. During one of the breaks, I noticed that their VR experience, which had been plugged as we left the auditorium, had no takers, so it seemed like a great opportunity to grab another enjoyable VR session.

There was a TV screen, as there usually is, so that bystanders can see what you see, even if they don’t experience it to the same degree. In front of the TV screen was a plank around 14 inches wide, comfortably wide enough to put two feet on, which will become significant later.

So I stepped up and asked if I could try it out. I stood on the plank. The guy in charge of things – let’s call him Jim – asked me to step off it and stand just behind it. At that point, he put the HTC Vive VR headset on me, and asked me to take one more step back as I was in the doorway of the (virtual) lift.

One step back and I was ‘in’ the lift. A button was pressed and I got the sensation of moving swiftly upwards. There was a slight gap in the doors, so I could see a skyline, that I was gradually rising above. After maybe five or six seconds, I arrived at my destination and the lift doors opened. That brief window had given me time to think about what might come next, and the only two things I could think of were that I would be standing on top of a very tall building with great panoramic views of wherever we were. Or maybe it would be a flying adventure where I wouldn’t move but, thanks to the beauty of VR, I would feel like I was moving.

Walk the plank
What happened next, however, was totally different and unexpected, and it completely spooked me. As the lift doors opened, I found myself standing on the edge of the tallest building you can imagine, looking down on the city below, and that 14-inch real world plank had turned into a virtual one, stretching out a few feet from the building. Jim, deadpan, said: “OK, so in your own time, can you walk to the end of the plank.”

And at that point, something in my brain just went AWOL. Yes, I knew that the plank I was being asked to step out on was only two inches off the ground. But still it took me 30 seconds to put my right foot on it. One issue – not sure how key this is – was that the virtual plank seemed about half the width of the real one, so that I had to ask Jim if the plank was wide enough to put one foot next to the other. He assured me that it was, so I dragged my left foot towards the plank at floor level until I could feel it against my instep. But despite thinking about it for what felt like 30 seconds, I couldn’t bring myself to lift my left foot onto the plank. Even though I knew I was in a room in the British Museum, and the worst that could happen was that I would stumble a couple of inches. Enough to break an ankle, admittedly, but even so…

And at that point, I ripped the headset off and sat in the nearest seat and asked for a glass of water, feeling seriously nauseous, as if I might faint, throw up, or both. Fortunately, I avoided both, but felt decidedly rough for the next few hours.

Deadpan delivery
Now this raises a number of issues. While my experience sounds like a negative one, you could argue that if VR is this convincing, it could help people overcome a fear of heights, a fear of flying, or a fear of almost anything else by simulating the thing they are afraid of, in gradual instalments. For the record, I’m not great with heights, but wouldn’t say I have a fear of them. I think it was the narrowness of the virtual plank and the unexpectedness of what I was confronted with that did for me. Plus Jim’s deadpan delivery.

I was interested to know how many people react like me and how many realise that it’s all a set up. So I put this question to Vibrant’s VP global marketing, Helen Mussard. She told me that of around 50 people who tried the experience at the IAB event, around half could not put a foot on the plank. So my reaction was not unexpected. “And with each step people are required to take along the plank, people drop off,” she told me. Drop off as in take the headset off, that is. If you do fall off the edge of the plank, a terrifying 2-inch fall, Mussard confirmed that you get the sensation of plummeting to the earth from a very great height. Glad I didn’t get that far then…

I was also interested to know if Vibrant created this particular experience purely for the thrill of it, or to challenge the idea that VR is all about fun. Here’s where the story gets really interesting. Vibrant isn’t even a VR firm. It’s Vibrant Media, an ad firm who have been around for 17 years and who I’m familiar with. I assumed yesterday’s Vibrant was another firm with a similar name in the VR space.

Meaningful engagement
Mussard told me: “We are an ad company, so we are always looking at ways brands can create more meaningful engagement. Brands produce a lot of their own content, but normally, it’s trapped behind an app. With the VR experience, we wanted to try to convince media buyers that VR is the future of advertising. By experiencing the plank, they could put themselves in the shoes of the consumers and experience this really compelling, engaging scenario. We are not a VR company, but the future of advertising has to be more interactive. We are all consumers and we want to experience things. We have come up with solutions for 360 video and AR and VR to help brands deploy these technologies at scale and our message to them is: don’t hide them in your app.”

So there you have it. I was just a pawn in a B2B marketing campaign. That said, I’m slightly relieved and reassured to hear that I wasn’t the only one freaked out by the thought of a 2-inch drop. Or rather, the reality of a 2-inch drop; the thought was of a much larger one. Or, seen from a different perspective, as a piece of experiential marketing, I take my hat off to Vibrant for a tremendous, terrifying idea.