During Wednesday’s lab, my group and I were able to experience “Waves of Grace” through the Samsung Gear VR. “Waves of Grace” told the story of a young Liberian woman who survived Africa’s deadly epidemic of Ebola, which has an infamously high mortality rate, last year. When I heard that the experience was about Ebola, based on what I’d learned in the media and a National Geographic video I had watched about Ebola back when I was in eighth grade, I automatically assumed that I’d be seeing something along the lines of graphic, bloody hospital scenes. However, what I got instead was a simple yet moving story about a woman who survived the impossible and who, as a result of her survival, has a new lease on life and she plans on using her second chance at life to help those around her. The power of her survival was shared through simple images of everyday life.

At first, as I watched the experience unfold, I remained in a stationary position, having seemingly forgotten that the experience was 360 degrees and that, therefore, I could move around. Andrew, who was my “spirit guide”, had to remind me that I could actually move my head to get the full experience. Physically seated in a swivel chair, but mentally inside the experience, I moved slowly in a circle, seeing aspects of the experience that I would never have noticed had I kept still. I saw the whole of a hospital room, the whole of a church, the whole of a fishing boat on the open sea.

“Waves of Grace”, in terms of its cinematography, consisted mostly of stationary shots that you could move around in, in a 360-degree arc, and fade in/fade out transitions to the next scene. The only moving shot that I remember was the opening shot where the woman walks down a beach, waves crashing on the sand. So I would say that the head tracking was impeccably smooth.

Andrew, who was the first person in my group to put on the VR headset, kept taking off the headset to clean the lenses, telling me that the lenses kept becoming blurry, possibly due to the heat of the equipment. When I put on the headset, I noticed that the lenses appeared blurry at times. However, the tightness of the headset also tightened the glasses that I wear on a daily basis and shifted my glasses a bit. So I cannot say if the blurriness was on the part of the lenses or my glasses or both.

Andrew and I were each other’s “spirit guide” when the other was using the VR headset. My time as Andrew’s “spirit guide” was uneventful. Like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in “Inception”, I stood waiting for Andrew to emerge from the experience. And, when my turn came, I did not suffer vertigo upon removing the headset at the end. Perhaps I suffered vertigo during the first time on the first day of class because it was my first time and I truly had never experienced anything to the caliber of virtual reality immersion before. In terms of the headphones, where I could hear the woman’s voiceover narration, the volume was loud but not overwhelming and fully immersive.

What continues to blow my mind about VR is how real and tangible it feels when you’re in it. I liken VR almost to the dreaming that we do when we are asleep, in the sense that it feels real when we’re in it and it is not until the headset comes off that we remember where we actually are. When I was seeing “Waves of Grace” through my VR headset, I actually forgot where I was, which has actually happened to me before watching movies at the movie theatre. With VR, it is so easy to have that kind of experience every single time. I recently learned in class that a brain scan done while people are having VR experiences revealed parts of the brain being activated that had never been activated before. These activations were only exclusive to VR. I am starting to love VR because each experience is truly different from the one before it. You have no idea what you’re up against and, once you’re in it, in a way, there’s no going back. Each VR experience I have only gets me more amped up for the one that I will eventually have to create from my own imagination.