Virtual Reality! This is it. We made it, world. Time to make up for all the boring and painful aspects of reality by creating cool environments in VR headsets! (Right on!)

Last Wednesday we had our first VR Storytelling class and we got to try out four different VR headsets models: the Samsung Gear, Oculus DK1, Oculus DK2, and Google Cardboard. Now, I had never experienced virtual reality before so going into this so I felt like a kid going to Disney for the first time. Actually, there are many parallels to this analogy; when I went to Disney I had to stop several times to look at the ground “It’s so clean! How do they do that?” Similarly, when I put on the Oculus DK1, which had an exploratory version of the Enterprise (Star Trek) loaded up, the walls and floor seemed to be the most interesting aspect of the experience “It’s like I can touch it!”

That's me, looking all futuristic.

I was so marveled by this experience that it could only come as a shock to me when my classmates pointed out that this was just the DK1; basically, there’s actually a better version of this.

“What?! No, wait, really? Wait, what?”

The next one, the Oculus Rift DK2, had, what I called, the “Warp Machine Space Thing”. It basically simulates space flight and you can activate warp speeds by using the gamepad. With the DK2, I had an amazing experience when I realized I could actually lean forward. At that point, I leaned forward so much that I tucked my head between my legs and was able to sort of “see” through my virtual self (very meta). The head tracking was smooth and the resolution was a lot better than the DK1’s. Even though the resolution and the 3D graphics looked better in the DK2, what really made it for me was the head tracking.

Most of my classmates had a very positive experience when trying out the DK2. On one occasion, when another environment was loaded up into the DK2, the user started experiencing weird jumps when he switched walking directions. The problem was consistent and we weren't able to fix it during the class time.

The next interaction we had was with the Google Cardboard, which seemed to be a super simple construction, but was still really fun. Even though is was simulating high-speed car travel, the experience felt completely comfortable. Actually, I never experienced any nausea or wooziness using any of the headsets; I felt completely in control of the experience.

I only got to try out the Samsung Gear to watch a trailer of Penguins of Madagascar (I know other people saw a performance of Cirque du Soleil), but watching the simple trailer in an immersive way still felt like a lot of fun!

Overall even though I am new to VR, I think I adapted pretty well to all of the environments and I can't wait to try out more.

Examples of cool VR:

http://www.fallenplanetstudios.com/affected-2/

https://share.oculus.com/app/a-chair-in-a-room

https://vine.co/v/OIKnEpTe7Zn