Specular Theory and Reel FX Virtual Reality for Social Good Experiences Highlighted in Los Angeles Business Journal

Imagine you’re a college girl attending your first frat party. You have a few drinks. You meet a cute boy. You dance. You pass out. And you wake up with your clothes removed. Raped.
Now imagine you’re the boy.

With “Perspective, Chapter 1: The Party,” you don’t have to, for the virtual reality experience puts the viewer in the shoes of both the victim and the perpetrator. The short film by director Rose Troche (“The Safety of Objects,” “The L Word”) played at the Sundance Film Festival last year to lines, its makers said, four hours long.

The sequel, “The Misdemeanor,” premieres today at the fest and plays all week at the New Frontier Exhibition and Gateway, this time exploring an encounter between New York City police officers and two young black men that quickly spirals out of control.

“It’s pretty heavy,” said Ryan Pulliam, co-founder and CMO of Specular Theory, the Venice, California, VR studio behind the films. “We think it’s going to create a lot more conversation.”

The series is part of a broader movement to use VR to promote social good. In addition to the “Perspective” movies and films by immersive journalist Nonny de la Peña set in a food line in Los Angeles and a terrorist bombing in Syria, brands are using the technology to support causes as well as deliver marketing messages.

“The idea is to really use VR for empathy,” Pulliam said.

AT&T, for example, partnered with animation and visual effects studio Reel FX to create a VR experience called “It Can Wait” to discourage drivers from texting while driving. In the simulation, the viewer drives a car through residential neighborhoods and busy streets with a phone in hand, narrowly missing bicyclists, joggers and schoolchildren and ultimately causing an accident.

The campaign has included TV spots, pop-star PSAs and a documentary directed by Werner Herzog, as well as the VR experience that toured 100 cities with a replica car.

“The ability of VR to viscerally connect people with an idea or shine a spotlight on a topic — really outside of personally being there, [virtual reality is] as close as you can get,” said Chuck Peil, Reel FX’s vice president of business development and strategic partnerships.

Economic VR hardware from Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR have been available since last year, but with consumer editions of Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR releasing over the next few months, the VR market is still quite small. A report released just this week, however, projected that more than 200 million VR headsets will be sold by 2020.

“It’s going to be massive,” Peil said. “As it relates to television, we are [in the] ABC, CBS and NBC black-and-white early days of TV.”

“When you have virtual reality, you’re literally immersing [consumers] into that scene or that cause or that place,” Pulliam told me. “Brands can see that level of engagement happening and get fans excited. There’s no better way to engage with something than to live that.”

Reel FX, which has studios in Dallas and Santa Monica, California, likewise has created VR experiences for clients, including a virtual tennis match against Maria Sharapova for HTC Vive, a holiday shopping installation for JCPenney, and a Performance Lab mobile marketing tour for the U.S. Air Force.

“Brands are using [virtual reality] as store drivers,” Peil told me. “It’s an idea of curiosity. Everybody wants to try it.”

But the power of VR, its proponents believe, lies also in its ability to drive awareness to causes businesses care about.

Consumers may get riled up about an issue, but “ultimately life gets in the way,” Peil said. “It dissipates and you never do anything about it.”

But “if you’re physically there and experience it and it affects you, that really motivates you to change,” he said. Virtual reality “confronts you in way that may be uncomfortable, but that’s not bad. Often we need to be made uncomfortable.”

Business and social good aren’t mutually exclusive, Peil added. “They’re often more powerful when the brand component is tied to something that effects change.”

Meanwhile, brands are already embracing VR as part of their marketing campaigns. Specular Theory just won a prize at CES for best live-action sports experience for a surfing video it produced for Jeep that makes users feel like they’re riding the waves themselves. And the company created a 360-degree immersive VR experience to promote “Terminator: Genisys” that puts viewers in the first-person perspective of a Terminator.