I try not to make a habit of letting major corporations play pranks on me. Yet for two beautiful minutes, I was a full believer in SnoopaVision.
On April 1, as an April Fools joke, YouTube released a fake promotional video for what they were calling SnoopaVision, marketed as “a fully immersive experience that lets you watch any video on YouTube in 360 degrees, with Snoop Dogg.”
The promotional video, entitled “Experience YouTube in #SnoopaVision,” shows clips of Snoop Dogg working in the YouTube offices and helping executives make decisions about his new YouTube feature, one they say would soon be made available on every single video on YouTube.
“What’s so awesome about this product is that finally you can combine 360 immersive viewing with a pioneer in West Coast G-Funk hip-hop,” says Preeya Khanna, whom the video describes as the 360-degree project manager.
It should have been obvious that Khanna was being sarcastic. It should have been obvious that YouTube would never introduce a feature that was geared toward only one celebrity and would allow that celebrity to provide commentary on every single video. The impossibility of recording Snoop Dogg’s comments on the millions of videos on YouTube should have been a red flag. It was definitely naive to think that SnoopaVision was real, but it seemed so amazing that I just willed it to be true.
“This technology is so immersive that sometimes, man, I forget if I’m in a video or real life,” Snoop Dogg says in the promo, with a blank stare that suggests he may not be lying.
The SnoopaVision example videos are short masterpieces. In each, users are able to use arrows to move the camera up, down, left and right around a theater, where Snoop Dogg and some of his friends sit watching a YouTube video on a big screen.
Videos in SnoopaVision include an eclectic variety of YouTube hits, from “When A Silverback Attacks” to “Little Boy Trying To Break Board in Taekwondo” and even “The Ice-Cream Van,” and Snoop has something to say about them all.
The concept of giving YouTube a 360-degree feature is incredibly cool and progressive. Plus, the idea of a Web series that shows famous musicians commenting on dumb YouTube videos is genius. SnoopaVision may just be an amazing joke, but its skeleton could provide some framework for the future of YouTube.
As Snoop Dogg puts it at the end of one video, “Dre has Beats, Jay has Tidal, Kanye has himself, and now the world has SnoopaVision.” If only the world had SnoopaVision to stay.
