Beat Saber, VR Chat, Arizona Sunshine, Rec Room, Richie’s Plank experience
This past week, I tried several different applications in Oculus Quest. (Beat Saber, VR Chat, Arizona Sunshine, Rec Room). First of all, I was pretty impressed by how wireless HMD has a decent tracking sensor. However, there is room for improvement. People tend to have a technological difficulty allowance. I had several issues with tracking and calibration. For example, when I played Richie’s Plank Experience, the wooden board pointed in the wrong direction. I had to re-calibrate everything in order to fix it. Secondly, There were rooms for improvement in UI. For example, It was tough to navigate through spaces in VR Chat. Even though this software is made for VR, It is easier to use it on PC. Also, It is tough to click on buttons and keyboard. I think VR Worlds need some UI optimized for VR. Just putting what is in real life into VR does not work sometimes. Also, the Lack of content seems like a problem. I prefer to sit down and watch artworks in VR than playing games, but VR apps were heavily focused on games, and whenever I wanted to try a different experience, I had to exit and download the experience. It was distracting. And Most of the time, experiences were disappointing. Lastly, I could not have fun ‘together’ with the people I am within the real world. We had to take turns, and the person who is waiting for his/her turn will get boring.
VR sickness is triggered by a phenomenon known as Visual Vestibular Mismatch (VVS), which is a fancy term for experiencing visual movement that your body didn’t physically perceive. Latency, framerate/ refresh rate, the method of artificial locomotion, and the tracking technology can each make a VR experience very uncomfortable. The people working in the background to bring VR to the masses have been hard at work solving the motion sickness issues. For the most part, it’s a solved problem now.