Watched a lot of videos and tried out quite a few apps on the Gear VR today.
First, the videos:
- Jim Carrey and Jim Carrey and Jim Carrey and Jim Carrey
- Samsung Bixby Button and how to KILL it by Unbox Therapy
- Robin Williams
- Why I love terrorists by Prince Ea
- Blippi, Stevin John and Detective Blippi (He is goooood!)
- Ryan Smith (have to)
- Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, and Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, and The Greatest
And moving on to the apps:
- Spheres – The theater experience was great. The UI worked. It was very spacious and had depth. The sound was spatial, and the initial God-voice was good. It made me appreciate the spatial audio later in the app.
- Suicide Squad: Special Ops VR – This one had great depth and variation of the spawning. The game design and timing was great. The assets were almost life-like.
- Oculus Prologue – The onboarding experience. As I had said earlier, I liked Daydream View’s onboarding experience better, but this is also great. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention the last time around. I remember starting it midway, and that probably made me feel the way I felt then. The assets were low-poly, and the entire experience revolved around a Dinosaur and a Butterfly. I wish Google had used a Dinosaur in theirs, just to pay homage to the T-Rex Game. I liked the touch of the Butterfly forming a bow-tie on the Dinosaur’s head. It was one of the things I remembered from last time.
- Angest – Seems to be a very long game. It had a very interesting setting, and we play a Russian cosmonaut. It was very immersive and had a good level of interaction with the objects in the environment. Movement was another good thing, compared to the dreadful experiences with the Daydream View and Space VR and Cave VR. In their defence, they were designed for the Cardboard very early on in the race. The movement here does not require a click. All it takes is a gaze.
- Samsung Fear of Heights – This one is done with videos in different locations. Self-assessment is an important practice here as in the old project. There are levels of difficulty, but the lines are blurred on how they were designed. The Extreme levels were good. The POVs do not have a person and that was a little awkward, especially in the skiing experience. It also calculates the heart rate with the respective gear.
- IT : FLOAT – A cinematic VR movie experience of IT, it was extremely scary. And you could say, more than the movie just because of the canvas being all around you.
Have to watch some more. Will update. Also, have to complete the mindmap.
Suraj at Samsung 