I don’t know if my expectations are too high or I just haven’t used the right equipment/app. Everything is pretty much meh.
Am I missing something?
I was lucky enough to visit the C6 at Iowa State during my college visit there - a full-sized room with projection on a six surfaces.
For some reason, nothing else seems as good…
What are your expectations? If you demand ultra-HD photorealistic real-time ray tracing, that will get expensive in terms of equipment. On the other hand, I have played some fun computer games that opted to go with cartoon-style, impressionistic, or even mimimalistic shading that perfectly fit the mood and arguably resulted in a more impressive virtual environment than a more computationally demanding one would have.
ok, those projector-based, surround-sound multimedia audiovisual exhibits are impressive, though again, it’s more about what the artist decides to do with the medium rather than details of the tech itself.
About 25 years ago my best friend and I went to some strip mall VR gaming place in the San Jose (CA) area. It was fairly expensive for a 10 minute session but I was impressed and wanted to try it again. Bear in mind that this was my first encounter with VR. By today’s standards it would be considered crude, but I was impressed then.
My friend keeps up on such things and is excited about the near future of VR gaming.
Are you not impressed right now?
its getting there but its going to be 4 or 5 more years before a really great game comes out for oculus or vive … psvr is just going to be VR versions of whatever is popular on their systems
10 years or so ago I was impressed by a video game in an arcade that to me felt like the spirit of VR even if it falls short somehow. It was like the old Red Baron arcade game where you had to shoot the airplanes before they get behind you, except you looked at the screen through binoculars as if you were behind the sights of a quad 50.
Some airplanes got behind me, so I assumed I was dead. But then I realized I had only been pointing the sights forward the whole time. I turned around and faced empty air and there the planes were. 360 degree vision in a game is an impressive feat.
Aside from video games, I’m intrigued by the idea of VR tours of places, VR amusement park rides, and the use of Google Maps streetview in VR. The former two are all over youtube, with people posting 360 footage, and the latter is supposed to be standard with any decent VR set. Has anyone tried these experiences yet?
I have been for a short time, but it wears off fast as well. It’s about a 3 to 5 minute high.
Also some people have vision issues that limits the 3d effect thus VR doesn’t look so ‘wow’ to them.
The original Oculus (c. 2013) made me impressively queasy if I used it too long. Could have been a motion-sickness effect, or maybe just staring at any video screen too long without taking a break is not a good idea.
A game called Dreadhalls was surprisingly good in an unpleasant way.
I found the Beat Saber game on Vive quite impressively immersive.
My brother showed me some demo on his Oculus — it was just a room with a computer, some disks, and some Polish writing. But I was absolutely fricking floored by it. It was amazing to me to feel like I was inside that virtual space. Truly trippy.
That said, the first VR demo I saw was maybe eight or so years ago at the mall, and it was just a demo of being on a very obviously computer generated city street, and then you begin to levitate to something like a thousand feet. It disoriented me so much that I needed about five minutes after taking the glasses off to feel back in reality.
In Tokyo we stumbled upon a VR experience where you strap on this whole vest thing and walk around in a room (you’re supposed to stay on a specific path, though). It was kind of awesome, despite a handful of graphical glitches.
For home users, I have Playstation VR and there are a bunch of really enjoyable experiences. Not many of them are MIND BLOWING but some of them legitimately are.
Resident Evil 7 is the closest you can get to being inside a haunted house. AstroBot is super charming. Even one of the demos, where you’re submerged in the ocean and get bumrushed by a great white shark, is pretty darn impressive.
I can only imagine how great VR can be with a better resolution + frame rate.
I was virtually impressed.
I was impressed by a VR horror game where you explore a haunted house. It was amazing to hear sound in every direction.
I still remember the voice whispering behind me: “Don’t turn around.”
Nah, needs to be 8k per eye (maybe 4k will do) to completely eliminate screen door effect to really impress me. And it needs to be able to do that and play an intensive beautiful game like RDR2 a max settings. Not sure how long that will take to be remotely affordable in the consumer market (5 years?), but that’s when I’ll take the plunge.
I’ve done VR tours of places that were scanned with a LiDAR scanner that were very impressive. However, it also made me nauseous and I could only do it for a couple minutes.
The only other things I’ve done are demo type games on the Oculus and they didn’t wow me.