Although I've had some experience in VR before, my time in the Innovation Lab helped me experience a lot more about the medium.

I was able to try new pieces of hardware such as the Samsung Gear and the RIEM 3. I think that the Gear VR and the RIEM were pretty great as more high-quality mobile versions of VR are concerned. They allowed portability, with the advantages of control using simple buttons to interact with the media. The 3D video on stage for a band at a music festival was an awesome application, especially for someone who may be handicapped and unable to attend. Although, having been to the Firefly music festival in Delaware, I have to say that particular experience did not fully immerse me in the crowd or remind me much of my time at the concerts. It was more like watching a live show on a screen as opposed to being there. A more realistic experience would be somehow adding heat, a sense of being crowded next to strangers, and the smell of cheap beer.

Going off of the experiences that I was in, I think that is where VR really is making some important moves. The Lebanon game where you played as someone living through a bombing was very moving. It allows someone to completely take a memory and recreate it for other people to live in, such as the controversial 9/11 game. This is the first time that a medium has allowed us to truly enter an environment made by someone else, in a lot of cases another user. This could be an experience as simple as riding a rollercoaster in VR, to something more intense such as riding a tricycle while wearing a headset.

Some of the experiences were pretty fascinating as far as how I interacted with media using a combination of my body and technology. The Oculus program with the different videos was fantastic for this reason. With the motion tracker, I was able to lean in and out and observe objects at will, and move around in a semi-circle to get a different perspective. All of this further made me think that "I was there".

I think the Hololense was, to me, the most impressive piece of hardware. I think that there are probably a lot more applications for AR or MR as opposed to just VR, such as Pokemon Go on phones. The ability to place full Windows applications in spaces and use them is fascinating. You can have an instance of Google Chrome open with a recipe as you cook dinner in your kitchen, without even having to stop once to take the ingredients out of your hands. Graphically, the experiences may not have been as immersive as the Vive or Oculus, but potential is certainly there. It's also unfortunate that the field of view is very small…

Overall, I think that most of the storytelling techniques worked at least fairly well. There are so many possibilities, it is just a matter of getting rid of all the technical glitches and little things in the way. Hopefully within the near future, VR will be completely immersive and allow us to live experiences and find entertainment in a brand new and exciting medium.