My path into VR
I bought my first VR headset about three years ago. I had recently got a Samsung Galaxy S7 and knew it was compatible with the Gear VR headset, so I got the headset and controller for $100. It blew my mind. Most of the people I have seen try VR for the first time are fairly blown away by it, there is just nothing quite like the experience of standing in a room that you know is entirely ficticious and your brain tricking you into thinking it might be real space.
There were a lot of problems with the Gear VR, the main one being that it had a tendency to overheat. Phones aren’t made to run VR games, and without a fan to keep it cool it will quickly overheat, the battery on your phone also gets drained very quickly and you have to recharge it a lot, which I am sure is not good for your battery life long term. The headset is also 3 degrees of freedom which means that it only understands what angle your head is pointed in, if you move it straight forward nothing happens (the same goes for the controller). While the experience is really interesting, its not something that I would ever use consistetly, there just wasn’t enough comfort and the platform wasn’t good enough for people to build great apps on top of.
About a year ago I bought an Oculus Quest, it cost me around $649. Obviously this is a substantial amount of money, especially for a student that usually wouldn’t spend that much money is a fortnight. I knew that VR was a technology that I wanted to be involved with, so eventually I was able to convince myself to get one. The first game I bought was Beat Saber, and I’ve been playing it obsessively ever since.
VR evangelists
VR has a strange community around it, many of its members are convinced that VR is the most important piece of technology of our time, and that it is crucial that we get as many people as possible involved with it so that it will develop faster (At some point I will find a link to a speech from an Oculus executive that reads like a religous sermon and put it here). I don’t really believe that, I think it is a great technology that will become more important going forward, but I don’t reallly believe that we will give up physical screens and looking at people with our real eyes and no lenses anytime soon. I do however really like showing off my VR headset, and seeing people have their first experience with the technology.
The key to an actually good first VR experience
VR speaks for itself, if someone has never tried it before, a room in which you can just pick up blocks and throw them around will still be impressive. I say this because there are a lot of VR experiences that people often show others as their first that while they have a lot of shock factor are not actually likely to be a good experience. The principal example of this is a Roller Coaster simulator. If people are motion sick the first time they try VR because they are immediately experiencing smooth locomotion, then they are much less likely to want to try it again in the future (as far as I understand they are also more likely to immediately feel motion sick whenever they put a VR headset on again the next time, don’t do that to your friends). I think Oculus did a really good job with its First Steps experience and if you have an Oculus device I would just go with that, but something like superhot that has an intuitive control scheme and you are mostly standing still is always good.
I also don’t just try and get someone to play immediately. There is often a lot of hesitation towards trying VR. I think this is mainly due to two reasons.
- They are worried about motion sickness (if they have tried a rollercoaster sim or something similar on a Gear VR then this is likely at the forefront of their minds).
- They are worried that will look silly, they won’t know what to do, and people will be judging them while they can’t even see them.
I’ve already talkeed about the first issue, to address the second I find that it is best to have a third person who has tried VR before and is playing a game before the new person has a go (this post is mainly addressed at people who own VR headsets themselves), the reason for this is that you are probably very good at using the headset, as one would expect you to be, you own it, and probably had a chance to get to know how to use it without anyone else looking at you. In order to convince someone that something is doable and they won’t struggle it’s easiest to show them by having someone who doesn’t have that much experience with the system use it in front of them, so they can see how intuitive it really is.
Summary
This article really could have just been this series of dot points:
- Rollercoaster simulators are bad for people who haven’t done VR before
- Oculus First Steps is really good
- Don’t show off how good you are something and then expect someone else to have a go, no one wants to follow someone who knows what they are doing, especially if other people are watching
- Oculus Quests and headsets like them are a whole new ball game compared to phone VR, if someone has tried that before, tell them you have too and this is a whole different thing
