My VR Experience On 8/30/17:

Vive (Solitary Confinement):

What an amazing experience. It was very shocking and realistic, putting the viewer in the perspective of the prisoner was that next level of immersion. Seeing the man walking around the cell and seeing the horrid conditions put the viewer in his shoes. The immersive technique was very effective and powerful.

A technique that didn’t work very well was the actual 3d image of the man in the space. He had this strange glow to him that was hard to ignore. He flickered sometimes and it was almost like a hologram. I broke the experience. He looked over lit by lighting they used to film the scene.

It was definitely a little disorienting at certain points and a little scary when the man from the story first appears to the viewer. He pops out of nowhere and begins his account.

I felt very present when we were on the outside of the jail cell looking through that little slit at him. It makes the prisoner look like a caged animal and not a human being. I felt like I was in a comic strip when the viewer was able to walk around the cell but reached the end of the square on the actual vive. This grid pattern would come up to warn you about the projection box but that is necessary so the viewer doesn’t walk out of scene and spoil the experience or hurt themselves.

Screen resolution was very sharp. You could see the grime on the toilet in his cell or the scratched paint on the walls. These details further immersed the mind into feeling like you were right there in that cell with him.  The flickering lighting from the halogen bulb also give it that extra touch of it being very poor conditions. It set a very depressing sad mood. The concept of 3d sound is executed moderately well in this film. I turned my head and was able to hear him at different volumes in different ears. There was very smooth head tracking and it was more like I was in the space with the man rather than watching something. I looked up and down trying to find the stitch in the film but there was none. The wired headset is a very slight problem. I was careful that I didn’t trip but overall it did not take away from the VR experience. This was a great example of different media’s coming together as one.

Oculus:

I have used the oculus last year when I was working on a start up with some friends of mine. We were a part of a company called little maxima and the concept was to be able to travel anywhere in the world that have these little pins on the map and find a breaking news article.  We ran a similar app on the vive and it was all about the use of 360 video and to show off the interactive map with a world of content.

I clicked on the state of Pennsylvania and viewed a video on the metal industry. Steel city aka Pittsburgh and its failing industrial grasp. The video was of drone footage of the foundry and this amazing sculpture of a deer head in the center of it. You hear the gravelly voice of a man who works at the foundry explaining how the times have changed. The story telling techniques really worked well in this experience because it wouldn’t move the viewer if you were just looking at one individual. I felt like it was much more powerful to see the amazing facility and how quiet and still it was because business is slowing down.

I never really got a comic book feeling in this experience. The video was crisp and the sound was in sync. It was very immersive.

The picture was clear and the sound was good but the one thing that took me out of the experience was having to stay within the sensors. I moved very slightly to the left and was immediately warned by a blue grid. I would wish that there could be a larger range for the vive rather than having only about a 4-foot radius. Head tracking was very smooth but when I looked up I was surprised to see not the blue sky like in the rest of the video but the companies name over a black background. If the viewer just slightly moved their head up they would see the creeping black outskirt of the logo on their screen. That was bad. This was also probably where they placed the stitch line. 3d graphics weren’t really present in this video. This experience was all around great, only very small editing changes to be made.

Samsung Gear VR:

This was a little less smooth then the other two VR experiences. In this experience, I watched a short video about one of my personal favorite movies, “The Iron Giant” In this movie we come across his hand (that behaves like a dog) searching for his body. You hear these loud footsteps and then he comes upon what he was looking for. Overall it was well produced and I loved that the story was about the iron giant but there were underlying technical issues that were hard to ignore.

I think everyone in the group agreed that the quality and the motion tracking was poor on the Samsung vr compared to the other devices. The film lagged when the viewer turned their head. One would see a black screen for a couple of seconds and then the movie would jump to that position. I felt like I was watching something rather than being immersed in the actual movie. The film itself was very well done and the graphics were amazing. Just the device lagged and it got very hot at times when I touched it. The audio was not 3d but it was loud and kept my attention.

Overall considering not only the price of the rig but also the set-up of Samsung Gear the user gets more than their money's worth.