Trying Something New – VR!

When we stop growing, we start dying.

Always need to be doing new challenges and this one seems really exciting.

Mike’s Blog 173

We all get comfortable. I think it is human nature to settle / nest into a home and routine. Our animal instincts. But in order to stand out and “get ahead” we need to always find a new challenge.

Maybe I am a bit too extreme on the try something new – as everyone always says I am doing something different every day!

Today we are excited for something pretty wild – doing VR tours inside Chinese factories. The Global From Asia team and Shadow Factory VR team went out to do our first 360 shooting at Ennoplus factory. I’m happy this factory is so open minded to try something innovative – as many other factories are waiting and seeing before deciding.

What exactly are we doing? We are making a “submersive” experience where people on the internet can get a full experience of various rooms and learn how things work inside a Chinese factory. Maybe people won’t need to fly over here anymore (and hey, with the way walls are being built up higher and higher between countries – this may be a reality!) and can use this technology to get a factory tour experience from home.

There is the saying – pioneers come back with arrows in their back. Which is a negative way of saying if you are the first to do something, you have the highest chance of failure. But on the positive side of that, if you are the first and it works well – then you have a huge advantage.

We all need to keep an open mind, I’ve been doing some content creation for Shadow Factory VR agency in Hong Kong for some time – and my wife is like – why don’t you make a GFA VR factory / China experience.

Like, duh!

All the pieces of the puzzle are like sitting there in front of us – but all too often we are too busy in the day to day busy-bee mindset to see it. This seems like a obvious next step for GFA and content in general – VR / 360 experiences. Because so many people can’t come out to China and other parts of Asia where we are, we can bring those experiences to them.

Should I be discussing this openly on a blog? Why not, put it out there – we are moving fast, have the technology, the partners, and the network to make it happen. Not even sure ourselves where it will lead – thinking of ways to make it win-win-win – for the factory, for the user, and for us!

All I can say is – trying something new is always risky – but hopefully you enjoy that. Try to open up your mind to “fail” or to “iterate” – for me – it is going back to those 5 values we had in a previous video blog – and contributing this kind of experiences of letting people around the world jump into a Chinese factory is pretty cool.

And we already want to do more things like tours around China and other parts of Asia. It seems obvious VR/AR is the future of the internet – and no one really knows exactly how, but by putting your neck out there and taking a risk is the only way to get a first mover advantage.

What do you think?