Cotton Delo published an article  on Ad Age that looked at Virtual Reality and its role in advertising. Virtual Reality got a big boost with Facebook purchasing Oculus Rift, the deal closed a couple weeks ago and for a good read on the deal check out The Guardian and their story “Facebook closes its $2bn Oculus Rift acquisition. What next?Social network completes deal announced in March, so what does the future hold for its virtual reality division?”

I personally was involved with a Virtual Reality company back in the late 90’s, they were publicly traded and my company was doing some consulting work. Back then there was a lot of hype and most of it centered on gaming, Dave and Busters was introducing VR related games and their was a lot of hoopla. I can say the biggest buzz came in the field o sex, I remember the CEO of the company I was consulting telling an audience, you will one day be able to use Virtual Reality to have sex with your favorite celebrity such as Pamela Anderson. It has been a good 18 years since that speech and I am not sure anyone has made much headroom with that, although some keep talking it up.

The Guardian has a good article here that takes a look at the last 20 years of Virtual Reality.

So Ad Age is looking at this from advertising point of view, looking at who will be the first adopters and what consumers can expect.

From the article:

Imagine Budweiser taking you behind the plate at the World Series or Pepsi giving you a virtual front-row seat at a Beyoncé concert.

But since marketers still need to provide the hardware, their efforts are currently confined to experiential marketing at large events, like the South by Southwest interactive festival and the Detroit Auto Show. However, the pace of innovation is likely to accelerate as new uses emerge—if, of course, more eyeballs migrate to VR technologies.

That may start to happen soon. Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts that manufacturers of VR and augmented-reality hardware—including smart glasses and head-mounted displays—will generate $1.06 billion in revenue globally by 2018.

Thanks to Coke
Virtual reality could be transformative for the ad industry. Instead of interrupting people with ads, marketers could sponsor virtual experiences people actually seek out. But first, the ad industry has to understand this new playground.

The Oculus Equation
The details of Facebook’s plans for an integration are still unknown, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has conveyed in no uncertain terms that his vision is to use Oculus’s tech for social networking—and that his company is making a bet on the next emergent computing platform after mobile. (Which would you prefer: hanging out with your faraway friend in a virtual environment or keeping tabs on her via her occasional status updates?)

“Oculus has the potential to be the most-social platform ever,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when announcing the deal in March. “Today social networks are about sharing moments, but tomorrow it will be about sharing experiences.”

Read the full article here

From a domaining standpoint, names like VirtualRealityAdvertising.com, VirtualRealityads.com are registered for some time. VRADS.com has been regged by a company using VR for another reason since 1996. VRadvertising.com was regged in 2013 and VirtualAdvertising.com has been registered since 1999.