How The Economist is attacking virtual reality

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about how The Economist is using virtual reality to tell stories on its website.

Southern writes, “Currently, the Economist is working on another VR project on how it can make a virtual experience out of its Big Mac Index, the publisher’s long-running demonstration of each country’s relative economic health through the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac. The aim is to see whether people understand more about economics through the interactive storytelling. There are also interesting opportunities in combining VR with the Economist Films division.

“The barriers most publishers face when it comes to implementing VR is cost and resource. ‘It’s definitely a labor-intensive task,’ said Diorio. ‘The industry is also so dependent on a small group of people who have mastered this and can stitch it all together. There are only a few experts.’

“Analysts estimate some $1 billion dollars have been invested in augmented reality and VR in the last year, according to Digi-Capital. Platforms like Facebook, Google and Samsung have embedded VR into their platforms. All this will come to a head in 2016 when we should start to see headsets popping up in people’s homes.”

Read more here.