China's Yelp Equivalent to Offer Consumers VR Restaurant Tours
On January 16, Dianping, China’s largest restaurant review site, announced the “Black Pearl Restaurant Manual,” which covers a total of 330 restaurants in 22 domestic and 5 overseas cities. In a move to experiment with virtual reality, Dianping is joining forces with VeeR VR—a VR content platform—to randomly select a number of nominated restaurants to create interior 360 virtual tours. These virtual tours will be included on their information page, enabling users to navigate first-rate restaurants from the comforts of their home.
Appraisal of the Manual reportedly took more than a month. The judge panel featured multiple gourmets, culinary experts and opinion leaders: Dong Keping, dining columnist and Chief Consultant of CCTV’s A Bite of China series, and Cai Hao, renowned whisky taster, to name a few. 468 candidates were chosen and publicly announced, followed by a final list of nominees after public opinions and anonymous survey results were taken into consideration. The Manual presents consumers with a guide of fine dining the Chinese people can proudly call their own.
Consumption upgrade is under progress as the economy welcomes another boom, and people nowadays are willing to spend more for better atmosphere and dining experience at restaurants. Dedicated to help more people “eat better, live better," Dianping is adapting to these new trends by consistently releasing product updates and optimizing its content, to deliver more diversified content and convenient user experience.
Dianping’s partnership with VeeR VR is an essential step toward its content upgrade. As the technical partner of this event, VeeR VR enables Black Pearl nominees to recreate their authentic environments through 360-degree media. In the past, customers could only piece together a faint clue about a restaurant through user-submitted images, missing many details about internal space and décor. Now with 360 virtual tours, users can follow the arrows to simulate an entire restaurant visit from passing through the entrance to accessing dining area, gaining a comprehensive understanding of Black Pearl nominees’ environment. This cross-industry partnership is an unprecedented experiment of forging win-win situations and unlocking consumptive potential by providing quality content on VR dining experiences.
VeeR VR hosts first-rate VR videos, 360 panoramas and various types of interactive media from all around the globe. With its high customer stickiness, VeeR VR was chosen by multiple prestigious organizations to be their exclusive content distribution partner in Mainland China, such as the Associated Press, Warner Bros., United Nations Development Programme, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. VeeR’s user demographic mainly consists of the younger generation that values living quality and is passionate about gourmet food, perfectly matching Black Pearl Restaurant Manual’s target audience.
