Google Australia Experimenting with Virtual Reality for Businesses

Executives are being deployed all over Australia as part of Google’s efforts to get small businesses live and online.
To showcase small businesses, Google Australia’s Lab team, along with their director Tom Uglow, has used 360-degree photography to come up with a virtual reality that allowed people a sneak peek inside businesses.
Known as Story Spheres, the technology gives users a tour around a space using the accelerometre in their phones. Audio capabilities may also be triggered so users can hear about the company they are viewing.
The Creative Lab at Google’s Australian office served as the location for the complete development of the technology. Story Spheres also works with Google Cardboard, the company’s virtual reality viewer, with the team replicating about 90% of the experience onscreen.
Mr. Uglow said Google Cardboard’s aim is to make virtual reality more accessible and fun for people.
Here’s how it works:
Story Spheres is created by adapting Google’s existing cardboard technology and adding sound to it. As an immersive experience, it’s a virtual recreation of what it’s like being inside a small business.
It remains to be in its experimentation stages, with the Google team bringing the technology to some regional centres in Dubbo in NSW, Launceston, Tasmania, Frankston, Victoria, and Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The Google team is coming to Perth next, and will be in Darwin, Canberra, as well as the Adelaide Hills in the future.
So far, people who have tried Story Spheres have enjoyed their experience. The project has allowed the team to meet a number of small business owners and to help showcase their work.
Google Australia’s head of small business marketing, Richard Flanagan, said the goal behind the project was to help small businesses get online as there have been many success stories left unheard about how the Internet has helped build and expand Aussie businesses with new customers.  Story Spheres is a way for these success stories to get heard.
As of now, there are no plans to turn Story Spheres into a product. Business owners can create 360-views of their business by using Google Business View.
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