#vr hangover

The dev kit comes with a demo of an office desk that looks like this:

I know it doesn't look like much but, wow you really do feel like you are in the space and all I could think of was loading up a Sarif Industries environment, which is absolutely possible to do. @_@

There's also this other demo environment that I'd also tried out before at an indie games fest last year, inside a human hamster ball, so you could actually do the walking thing (yay movement). It was sweet. The interior and exterior of the environment looks like this:

While I didn't have issues with motion sickness inside the hamster ball, I did trying this same demo out at home. It's amazing, like as soon as you go up the virtual staircase in this place, your brain just instantly goes 'What are you doing? Stawp. Why do you hate me? Fine, you're gonna burn alright'. Doesn't matter if you're prone to motion sickness or not. It's all equal opportunity here. It's called VR hangover.

Which really sucks because Valve went and optimized a version of Half Life 2 just for Oculus. I tried it. I didn't get very far. I'm wondering how long it would take to get acclimated to the setup, because it really was awesome being there in City 17.

Also, I went to the same indie games fest again this year, and compared to last year, there were so many more Oculus games being shown. People seemed to really have jumped onto DK2. And I tried some games that didn't end up making me feel like I'd been drinking really cheap liquor all night.

So while a challenge right now for game designers working in VR is to lessen or avoid this effect, I gotta say, when I put on the gear and became immersed in a world, I totally felt like: