Gear VR

[clyde]

Gear VR is rad imo.

I haven't used another virtual reality device, so I can't compare it to others.

After using it for a few hours, I have some things to say, especially regarding what my assumptions were.

Nausea:
Nausea is an issue for both myself and my wife, but it's a spectrum, not a binary. What I mean by this is that we've been trying out the demos and developing understandings about what increases our nausea and what does not. The Gear VR does not detect head-movement beyond rotation and this is the biggest cause of our nausea. So we have to be a bit cognizant of how we move our heads; doing things like leaning in and straightening my posture when I'm hunching give me little stings of nausea which accumulate. The nausea is similar to the nausea I experience if I read an email or forum post in the passenger seat of a moving car. I can recognize it happening and stop doing the thing that is causing it (which is typically non-rotational head-movements while in Gear VR). Regardless of my head-movement management, trying out all sorts of demos, I can only last about 30 minutes right now. I suspect that I will be able to manage it longer, but my understanding of what is happening makes me look forward to VR devices that can track non-rotational head-movements.

Radness:
This thing is cool as shit. Listening to my wife's observations while she navigates cyberspace is very enjoyable. Being in cyberspace is fucking cool. The sense of scale is exciting. We are also experiencing notable moments of disassociation with the physical world which are entertaining and surprising us. My favorite example was while I was playing the Colosse which is a cartoony, paper-crafty, short play with two characters nearby; a NPC comes akwardly close while carrying a spear. In playfulness, I reached out to touch the spear and felt a chair in physical space that was inhabiting the same position. It freaked me the fuck out. It was an incredible moment of illusion.
I don't see the value of this device being the ability to not be in physical space though, it's much more the ability to be in virtual spaces. I've explored probably 20 different environments briefly and what is most striking is just visually inhabiting a (typically central and unmoving) spot in a space created by digital media. Even the 2D, 360 photos can provide a novel perspective. The most impressive spaces I've seen though are the OTOY dioramas (which are 3D and seem to be somehow more plump than other 3D scenes) in the Oculus Photo app. There was a fictional one-room apartment that was claymation-esque and it was so cool to examine it. Exploring these brief experiments is super interesting and sci-fi as shit.

Technical Limitations:
I read a lot about VR developments over the last 3 years, keeping up with it as an enthused consumer. You've probably come across people describing things like "the screen-door effect" and heard passioned claims about the importance of a few degrees of FOV. All of this stuff has an influence, but I'd like to just give you an idea of which of these things seem relevant and which do not after an hour or so of use:
-Screen-door effect: It's fine. Yes, you can tell that things are made of pixels. It's noticable, but it's not a deal-breaker what-so-ever. In fact, I kind of see it as a particular aesthetic that I know I will at some point be nostalgic for. There is this moment in Introduction to VR where you are hanging out in a yurt with some folks. They look pixelated, but it just makes it feel like an intimate tele-presence rather than a convincing illusion of reality. It's cool.
-FOV, You are basically using a scuba mask the entire time. This is most noticeable during the underwater-simulations. This does create a sense of disconnect, just like when snorkeling. I always feel like a visitor in the environment, the FOV makes me feel like this is not a default perspective. But imagine having a scuba-mask that you can put on in your living room, that once on allows you to look around a remote or fictional place. It's cool as shit.
-The lack of positional tracking (non-rotational head-movement): I can totally imagine this being a significant enough limitation for someone to decide to wait for another device. I have no regrets though and neither does my wife. We both feel confident that we can manage the nausea by developing best-methods and being picky about which apps we play. The ones that we can play without problems easily make the device worthwhile for us. Still, I can imagine never going back once we have a device that can track non-rotational head-movements.
-Overheating: It totally overheats, but the manual says it doesn't damage the phone. I'm sure this will become annoying, but thus far, it happens when I should stop anyway (after about 30 minutes).

Content:
There is a bunch of free stuff. Everyone is gold-rushing to recreate every genre in computer-game history in virtual reality. The thing is that screenshots and videos are useless in determining what I will enjoy. Take for example Smash Hit.

I looked at those videos of gameplay and was like "I think I can safely skip that one, it looks simple and boring." I just played it tonight and it was fun as shit. Flying through those environments at 45-60 mph throwing giant pinballs at pleasurably breakable crystals turns out to be surprisingly engaging when you are in there. Strong recommendation. Note: When it first starting moving me, I got a ping of nausea, but for some reason it stopped after about 20 seconds of play. The game doesn't make me nauseous at all now.

Smash Hit is the only dexterity-challenge I've played thus far even though there are some other free ones, but it's worth saying that the rooms and spaces tend to be the main attraction for me. The OTOY dioramas were so cool. They are one of the things I'm looking forward to just looking through for a few minutes each. there's a lot of stuff like that.

OK. that's about all I want to say about it now.
Oh and if any of y'all have a Gear VR, I'd be interested in chatting in Oculus Social though I'm really difficult to schedule with. I'm not sure if you can look people up to chat with them though. I only did it for a minute once, for the first time this evening.

Edit: Oh, and I don't think it's feasible to use this device without a chair that spins.
 

Thank Erkki for cleaning it up.

[Zeusthecat]

Thanks for writing all of that up clyde. I've been pretty curious about the gear VR for awhile and will definitely be getting the oculus rift next year but have never had any opportunity to actually try any of it. So these types of testimonials are all I have to go off of until I buy one.

[Apelsin]

Is it correct that this device will only work with Galaxy Note 4?

[xchen]

Or the other galaxy I'd imagine. S6 or whatever

[clyde]

Is it correct that this device will only work with Galaxy Note 4?

S6, S6 edge, S6 edge+, and the Note 5.

The Note 4 is not supported, but it was able to run the innovator edition. Folks on Reddit are becoming disappointed as they discover that the Oculus Store doesn't seem to be fully supporting the Note 4 now that the consumer-version has been released.

My wife has an S6 so that is what my impressions are based on.

@Zeusthecat Check to see if a nearby BestBuy does demos. That's where I tried it out for the first time.

[melmer]

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<p><span style="didnt-read:lol;">we should write <em>all</em> comments like this</span></p>

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[clyde]

Yeah, I don't know what happened but I haven't had a moment when I've wanted to manually delete all those tags(?)

Also: Just tried Dead Secret which is like a mobile version of Gone Home in form. I looked down and saw that I had not only a broken arm in a sling, but I also had boobs! That was really cool but the proportions feel odd. I can't tell if the avatar is very petite or if boobs really get pushed that far to the middle of the chest when wearing a bra. I will report back once my wife gives me her feminine perspective.

Update: She says that it looks normal, but that her body is small.

[Erkki]

[edit] deleted [/edit]

[clyde]

A few days in here are some more thoughts.

I view this device as an environment display more than a gaming-machine. When I imagine things that I would like to do in here, it's not shoot dudes, play sports, or match-three; I want more 360'3D captures/videos of South Korea and stage-plays. Oh in case I didn't mention it:

There are 360'photos, 360' videos, and then 360' stills that are also 3D, and 360' videos with 3D. I prefer 360' 3D stills and videos.

That said, the 360' video that was five minutes of the Lion King musical was kickass and I'd love to see more of that type of thing (especially if it was also 3D).

Gripes: It's inconvenient that I have to go into cyberspace to pick which videos I want to download within the apps. It would be musch better if some Oculus apps were openable from the regular phone interface and I could search and queue up downloads that way.

Also, I had to mention these OTOY dioramas again. I think the last time I was impressed by visual fidelity to this degree (besides seeing Vermeer paintings in person) was when the Nintendo came out. I suspect that these things are going to be what virtual-reality and augmented-reality games and movies will look like in 5-10 years. They are incredible visually.

[clyde]

I just showed my father-in-law the Cirque du Soleil performance Kurios which is 3d and 360. He watched for about 5 minutes and then the phone overheated. We spent the next hour talking him down from a mild existential crisis. Apparently he thought it would be more like a 3d movie on a screen and he was not prepared to have 3d people surrounding him and poking at him. Simply put, he was not ready because he had no idea that anything like VR existed. He wants to try it again but keeps on saying "That was too spooky, that was just so spooky, I'm glad you guys were here. I couldn't do that when I'm alone." I wasn't prepared for it to shake anyone like that and I'll be more mindful in the future.

[clyde]

I encountered my first hyper-sexualized female 3D model in VR while looking around in Dirrogate: Memories with Maya (the 360 video is look-aroundable

, but without the 3D and scale it's... absurdly compressed. The hands at the concert are actually multiple paralleled 2D layers of video at different depths for instance. Still, you can grab the screen and rotate it in the Youtube player). During Maya's first scene on the balcony, I was like "Ah, ok Second-Life lady." and didn't really notice much beyond her 3D modelness. But in the scene that starts at 4:15, she looks like a giant female athlete with a waist-size unlike anything I've seen in the physical world. I'm not someone who notices how off Barbie's proportions are with a casual glance. But in VR, I am completely distracted by it. I thought this was an interesting anecdote about the differences I experience in this medium. I liked being in the room with the 3D people models. They just look like giant animated dolls and I find that really novel. I wonder if it fires off some child-part of my brain, Maya isn't larger than a woman can be, but she is larger than any woman I've seen in the last decade. If you told me that there was a VR app where I could just sit in some lobby and watch Second-Life-esque 3D models wander around, chat and do their dance animations, I would totally download and play it. Fictional people models in VR is appealing to me in a similar sense to going to the zoo to be present with animals of varying sizes.

There are some odd, amateurish 3D efforts available on GearVR that I think will be made obsolete very quickly. It's neat to watch the artists try. The darkness of the bedroom feels off in a way that I was more interested in the nature of the shadows than the story. The comic-panel being skewed just compelled me to cock my head to the side during that entire scene. The frame-rate of the 3D rendered portions of some scenes are slow dissolves that was something I'd expect from Sandman or Mystique when they don't have the energy to keep up their anthropomorphic form. The part where they used a morphing transition between buses and motorcycle-carts was actually in 3D which was very disorientating (especially when the camera was moved between the shots that were eventually morphed). It's a really odd piece of media and this is not the first I've seen that I was happy to watch once with this type of interest.

[JonCole]

I really wish that I could get one of these but they've been sold out since before Thanksgiving and it seems like a new batch won't ship out until mid or late January. 

[clyde]

I really wish that I could get one of these but they've been sold out since before Thanksgiving and it seems like a new batch won't ship out until mid or late January. 

 

I'm not sure if this helps, but I suspect that once I get an Oculus Rift, I won't use the Gear for anything beyond demos to friends and family. It gets really heavy and uncomfortable after 30 minutes or so of use and I imagine that the addition of positional-tracking is going to make a huge difference for anything that isn't a 360 3D photo or video (though they might be able to simulate that little bit of movement, I don't know),

 

Oh and I also managed to get into a multiplayer jam-session of

for the first time last night. I was really hoping I would be able to see the other little person bobbing their head to the beats and moving around to make selections (you can not). Ultimately it was a nice communal experience (I think), but they may have left because I was changing their beats constantly in order to mutate the song performatively. There wasn't enough communication to be able to tell. The appeal of that app is the feel of multiplayer performance. The VR portion is alright, but I'm surprised I haven't seen something that does the same thing on PC. The Google Jam thing had big latency problems when I tried it with Dibs a long time ago.

[aprettycooldude]

Mine is arriving today! Definitely gonna pick up Soundscape, Smash Hit, and Darknet ASAP. Is there anyway to download the Oculus app and games beforehand?

[clyde]

Mine is arriving today! Definitely gonna pick up Soundscape, Smash Hit, and Darknet ASAP. Is there anyway to download the Oculus app and games beforehand?

 

I wouldn't install anything until you get the device it doesn't take long at all. Just turn the volume on your phone up, plug your phone into the Gear, wait for it to tell you to remove the phone, and then I think the Oculus app appears on your phone automatically.

Downloading while you are playing games can make it overheat (doesn't damage the phone, but stops you from playing) so I wouldn't cue up a ton of downloads until you are ready to stop for a little while. I think Smash Hit is a really small file though (I might be wrong). Make sure to check out the Otoy section in Oculus photos.

[aprettycooldude]

Does it take Google Play banana bucks?

[clyde]

I think we signed up for an Oculus account.

[clyde]

Mine is arriving today! Definitely gonna pick up Soundscape, Smash Hit, and Darknet ASAP.

So how is cyberspace?

[Ben X]

Are you defining cyberspace in the traditional "notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs" sense, or using it to mean "anything in virtual reality"?

[clyde]

I was referring to the virtual reality space but I was trying to be cyberpunky.

[aprettycooldude]

I'm loving it, but it's pretty fucking creepy! Smash Hit is great, and responsible for my only real fit of nausea so far (stage 4, I think? The first one where the world spins and you go through it super fast). I actually didn't pick up Darknet, I picked up Viral, which is pretty fun and definitely worth the $5. Soundscape is super awesome, although I wish it wasn't bound to pentatonic scales. I've definitely caught myself jamming out to short riffs I've set up.

 

I say creepy because I had my first real dissociation episode during the "VR Introduction" video of all things (after about 45 minutes of Smash Hit). I fired it up, and when I got to the Tibetan (I think?) dinner, I instinctively reached for something and then promptly yelled (out loud, not internally) "WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY HANDS"

 

Thankfully, this was 3pm, so everyone else who shares the house (upstairs and downstairs neighbors, my roommate) was at work, and no one came running to make sure I hadn't somehow used a hacksaw to remove limbs

 

So it's going well!

[clyde]

That yurt was our first moment of "whoa, whoa, whoa" too.

I think Felix & Paul Studios did did that video so make sure to check out Cirque du Soleil's Kurios.

I can't play through that level of Smash Hit it makes me too sick.

Yesterday I browsed the 360 photos of Rome and that was pretty cool. I didn't realize that all the sculptures are huge. My favorite photo is of some ruins laying on the ground in a sunken courtyard between a bunch of more modern buildings. They are fenced of an every angle of the site is covered by ostentatiosly placed security cameras.

[clyde]

I just checked out vTime and it impressed me. Sitting and talking with strangers isn't for everyone, but there is a lot of potential there. The moment that I became convinced was when we were sitting around a campfire talking about VR (of course) and I saw a snake. We talked about where the snake was headed and confirmed that the positioning was consistent between our views. The combination of that and being able to see where each person is looking was enough to make me feel that I was having a multiplayer experience significantly different than any I've had before. We sat in outer-space just listing all of the potential things the app could do, it was inspiring. Absolutely worth checking out and just so you know, the phone's mic did work for me.

[clyde]

I just joined a vTime session with random folks. There was a woman who would only nod and shake her head hosting (and sometimes what seemed like a recorded giggle would play), and a guy from Illinois who was chatting with me about how cool this form of telepresence is. Someone else came into the chat and sounded like a kitchen full of extended family. His mouth is moving, his head is moving, his arms are waving and he sounds like a room full of people because he was a room full of people. It was really strange to have them pass off the headset to other folks since for the rest of us, this chaos was all in one avatar. Eventually we started talking with a woman who didn't seem to have done any vr before, so there was a lot for her to take in. We were all sitting together on some rocks in a creek when a bald man with an orange moustache looks down and says in a high-pitched voice "I don't have any boobs!".

[aprettycooldude]

Definitely gonna download vTime tonight and give it a shot. It's got a "meet up with friends" mode, apparently, so it might be cool to get a group of VR Thumbs sittin' around staring at creeks.