Google, whose majority of revenue comes from advertisements, continuously keeps working on strategies to make its ads better. Keeping in mind that virtual reality is becoming more and more popular every day, the company has started to prepare itself for monetization through VR.
At Google’s internal workshop for experimental ideas, Area 120, the company is experimenting with a format of ads with a project named Advr. On Wednesday, the firm revealed how ads might look like in a blog post. This is currently not a complete product but a prototype of what might become the future of VR ads.
According to Google, the developers are facing hurdles while implementing ads in VR, which is the reason why the project was started.. The company stated in its blog post:
We heard from developers that they"re looking at how to make money to fund their VR applications, so we started experimenting with what a native, mobile VR ad format might look like.
The main hurdle for developers is the disruption of the user"s experience. So developing ads that are simple and minimally disruptive are the priorities of the project. Google came up with the idea of presenting users with a swiveling cube, which they can interact with if interested. This cube, when tapped on or looked at for a couple of seconds, transforms into an advertisement video. This can be seen in the GIF below.
The blog states some key principles on which this project is based on:
VR ad formats should be easy for developers to implement, native to VR, flexible enough to customize, and useful and non-intrusive for users.
The devices listed that will support this ad format, including Google"s own Cardboard (on Android and iOS) Daydream, and Samsung Gear VR. Google has invited VR developers to test this format using an early-stage SDK.
Source: Google Blog