If you get grounded in virtual reality, you get grounded in real life

I keep researching the new VR stuff and thinking “this could be fun, but it’s still too expensive and impractical”. Finally took a quick jaunt to the Portland Microsoft store this morning hoping for a demo of the HTC Vive VR headset to see how it feels in practice.

Turns out they don’t have the Vive set up for demos right now because it requires a lot of setup and space for the room-scale tracking, so instead I did a quick demo with the Oculus Rift, which doesn’t require as much space set aside.

First impressions:
* They make you sign a waiver in case of motion sickness…
* Might have been able to fit over my glasses, but I opted to just go without (my uncorrected blurry vision is still slightly better than the resolution of the Rift anyway)
* Turned it on – hey that’s pretty cool!
* Screen door effect from the pixel grid is very visible at first but kinda goes away.
* Limited resolution is also noticeable but not that big a deal for the demo content. I imagine this is a bigger problem for user interfaces with text though.
* Head tracking is totally smooth and feels natural – just look around!
* Demos where I sit still and either watch something or interact with the controllers were great.
* Complete inability to see real world gave a feeling of helplessness when had to, say, put on the controllers…
* Once controllers in hand, visualization of hand/controller helped a lot.
* Shooting gallery demo was very natural with the rift controllers.
* Mine car roller coaster demo instantly made me nauseated; I couldn’t have taken more than a couple minutes of that.

For FPS-style games and similar immersion, motion without causing motion sickness is going to be the biggest problem — compared to a fixed screen the VR brain is much more sensitive to mismatches between visual cues and your inner ear’s accelerometer…

I think I’m going to wait on the PC VR end for now; it’s a young space, the early sets are expensive, and I need to invest in a new more powerful PC anyway. Microsoft is working on some awesome “mixed reality” integration for Windows 10, which could be interesting to watch but the hardware and software are still in flux. Apple is just starting to get into it, mostly concentrating (so far as we know) on AR views on iPhones and iPads, but that could become something else some day.

Google’s Daydream VR platform for Android is interesting, but I need a newer phone for that — and again I probably should wait for the Pixel 2 later this year rather than buy last year’s model just to play with VR.

So for the meantime, I ordered a $15 Google Cardboard viewer that’ll run some VR apps on my current phone, as long as I physically hold it up to my face. That should tide me over with some games and demos, and gives me the chance to experiment with making my own 3D scenes via either Unity (building to a native Android app) or something like BabylonJS (running in Chrome with WebGL/WebVR support).