During the first class exercise, we were given the chance to experience four virtual reality experiences: Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2, Google Cardboard, and the Gear VR developed by Samsung in collaboration with Oculus. Having tried versions of the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard in the past, I was most excited to see how people who hadn’t tried VR would react.

We started at the Oculus DK2 station and I watched as one of my group members went through the Lord of the Rings experience. Having never tried VR before, she was noticeably excited and impressed. Based on her excited exclamations and the amount of looking around she did, it appeared that she was very immersed in the experience. My next group member went through the Iceland experience and she was even more vocal and energetic while wearing the headset. As this was her first time in VR as well, I noticed that she kept extending her hands trying to interact with the environment. This is the inherent problem with current VR experiences, the illusion is broken when the user cannot interact as if they were physically present.

The next station was Google Cardboard. The major difference between this experience and the last was the options were mostly video driven. I tried the Google Maps experience which was very cool. You were seeing the streets of a foreign country as if standing through the sun roof of a car. It was sped up to allow the user to see more in a short period of time which created a sense of uncanniness. One of the nice things about Cardboard was the fact that it’s wireless. Whenever you bump into the wires of the Oculus Rift models, it reminds you that you aren’t actually in the experience.

The next station was the Gear VR. This was another wireless headset and the experience that my group tried was the Cirque du soleil performance. This was a great example of an effective storytelling technique within VR as the performers surround the user and this causes the user to want to look around.

The final station was the Oculus Rift DK1 which, though noticeably lower definition from the other headsets, was none the less engaging. The Star Trek experience was a bit limited in scope, but its use of sound was a nice touch. As the user entered the cockpit, the sound of a piolet from the enemy ship came on. What brought me out of this experience was how slow the camera moved. The situation conveyed an enemy attack, but the user moved as if casually strolling through the park. This made me realize that this is an important storytelling technique for VR.

Overall, I found that the Gear VR and the Oculus Rift DK2 gave the most immersive experiences. I also came to the realization that the hardware involved is much less important than the quality of the story or experience it is conveying. I found that the graphics aren’t important if the story is powerful enough to cause the user to suspend their disbelief. In addition, the DK2’s ability to allow the user to lean in and out brought another layer of immersion. Finally, I believe that an experience that combines a graphically rendered landscape and 3D video could create a uniquely immersive experience.

From the Oculus share blog, I found three experiences that I think would be great to try. The first is called Kite & Lightning: Senza Peso and it is a journey into that afterlife that combines beautifully rendered environments with 3D video elements added in. The second is MineCrift which is a VR Minecraft and I think that would be awesome. Finally, Pixel Rift is a game within a game where the player is a person playing an old school NES style game in various settings. It seems like a really cool concept and method of further immersion into an environment resembling Inception.