Tuesday, December 4, 2018


Experiencing a virtual reality

My cousin bought a Samsung Odyssey VR headset over the weekend and I got to hang out and play with it. At first I played a a rhythm game Beatsaber, where I orientated myself in the virtual reality. In reality, I had controllers and in VR I had two lightsabers that I had to slice notes with as they passed through me. The timing wasn't hard to nail, depth perception in a virtual reality didn't seem to differ. After the tutorial was over I spun around and saw just how convincing the virtual reality was. While the scene wasn't necessarily detailed, it was immersive enough to convince me I was actually in this neon visualizer. When I took the headset off there was a bit of disappointment and disbelief. Disappointment in that I wasn't actually in the VR, and disbelief that I wasn't actually in the VR, but staring at the wall in my cousin's computer room.

Later, I tried a bunch of different games, but one that stood out was The Lab, as a premise, it's hard to explain, but in it are mini-games. One of the mini-games is just a basic walk around and identify things task. This mini-game was based on another game, Portal, and I had to repair a robot. In doing so, I had to open it up and read a number on one of the parts. The detail wasn't quite there for me to make out the fine print under the numbers, but I found myself squinting trying to read the print.

As a small side note, the movement in VR is sort of nauseating. As we've mentioned multiple times in class, vision overpowers other senses, so when "I" am moving and my legs are not, I got pretty nauseous, pretty fast. To alleviate this, a lot of games have a leap frog mechanic where you point and click to where you want to be within boundaries as opposed to fluid movement.

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