Oculus Touch: first review

Some days ago, finally my Oculus Touch that I preordered some months ago have arrived… but I haven’t been able to try it thoroughly until today, when I played 2 hours with them. I’ll write here a short review about them and then I’ll write a more detailed one on our Immotionar website in the next days.

I’ll drop the bomb immediately: I did not fall in love with Oculus Touch. Now I’ll give fanboys the time to go at the end of this article and write bad comments about me saying that they want to kill me… have you done it? Ok, now I can go on happily :). Let me explain what I mean… I like both Oculus and Vive, so it is not a matter of brand…

Palmer Luckey, don’t get angry… but I don’t think that your controllers are super-awesome

Street Champ VR review

Yesterday I played a bit with Street Champ VR,  a simple street-crossing VR game available for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive made by Romanian company Zynk software Srl.

The goal of the game is pretty simple: cross the streets and try not to die :).  You are in this cartoon city and you have to cross this endless set of streets that are full of cars. To cross the streets you have to simply press the key on your remote or gamepad: this will make you perform a single step forward.

The only HUD of the game: number of performed steps and fatigue level for your steps (if you don’t run that much, it remains almost always green)

If you keep the button pressed, you will start running… but don’t try to run too much, or you will get exhausted and you will start moving slowly, being less reactive to incoming cars. If a car runs on you while you’re crossing the road, you die and the game ends.

V: a super dashboard for virtual reality

Some days ago I was reading an interesting article on Road To VR about a new program called ‘V’, that proposes itself as a dashboard for virtual reality. After reading the article I got curious, so yesterday I decided to try it so i can review it for you.

First thing that I found interesting about it is its name: only a letter, the letter ‘V’. That’s really curious and reminded me of an idea I had some times ago: when at Immotionar we were discussing about the name to give to our full body VR system, I proposed the simple name of ‘I’ as a super-original name, that could be super-great, because it is pronunced as “eye” and because it represents the self, and our system lets you see yourself in virtual reality; Gianni didn’t appreciate my genious idea and looked at me with commiseration. I’m glad that in this world there is someone that has my same genious ideas and is brave enough to make them become true. The only problem with this super-short name is that it is complicated to search on Google, so it took me a bit to find the download link for their beta…

Lantern review

Some days ago, I’ve been contacted from 1C publishing studio for a possible review of one of their games: Lantern. I’ve said to myself “why not?” and so I played a bit with their game… and here you can find my honest review.

Lantern is a relaxing experience for Oculus, Vive and OSVR: you can find it on Steam, where you can download a little demo and then purchase the full game for €6,99, if you want. It isn’t truly a game, but more something that you can play to have some relaxing moments in virtual reality.

When the game starts, you’re provided with a 2D menu that is hard to control with mouse and keyboard: I’ve had lots of difficulties in understanding how to activate the menu entries, because the cursor sometimes disappeared.

The start menu. For me it has been the first puzzle of the game

Once you manage to click on start, a little 2D intro showing an asian girl is proposed to you, just to put you in the right mood for the game that starts little after.

The intro with beautiful drawings and a beautiful asian girl crying

The game environment is a nice low-poly world, where all is gray and sad. The visuals are very nice and I appreciated them. You can control a little lantern to spread the love and make all the world become coloured again. You control the lantern with your space key (that acts as a throttle) and with your mouse (that sets the direction towards which the lantern can move in the space).The control system is interesting and very easy to use, once you’ve mastered with it a bit. Luckily they’ve added little icons nearby the lantern that appear when the user seems struck, just to help the novice user with the controls: I appreciated this a lot.

Allumette Review

After having tried the wonderful Senza Peso and the too-short Lost, I decided to try another short animation movie called Allumette, by Penrose Studios.

This is a little movie that you can look with your Oculus Rift and that talks about a story clearly inspired by The Little Match Girl of Hans Christian Andersen. If you know something about this Danish novel, well, you know that it’s very very sad: also this VR experience is sad and you’ll have ninja cutting onions near you and making you cry: you’ve been warned.

Lost (by Oculus Studio) review

I tried Lost, a little movie by Oculus studio. And this is its little review. Oculus Studio is the content branch of Oculus and it is capable of making awesome things like Henry, the animation short movie telling the story of a cute hedgehog.

Henry, maybe the best animation movie for Oculus (Image by Wired)

So today I was very happy to try Lost, hoping that it was as awesome as Henry (or as Senza Peso).

Senza Peso review

After having read its name so many times, today I decided to try Senza Peso for Oculus Rift. Senza Peso is an artistic experience for Oculus Rift made by Kite & Lightning studio. Kite & Lightning is a VR studio that is out since a while and every title that they’ve made has proven to be very cool (for example I tried Insurgent some times ago and it was really well made), so I was quite sure that Senza Peso was something really magnificent, too. And in fact, it was.

Senza Peso, a mini Opera… even the logo and the intro are very well made

Google announced Daydream

Yesterday Google announced its new flagship phone, Pixel, and a lot of new epic stuff, among which its new virtual reality platform: Daydream. If you, like me, didn’t watch the live streaming (too lazy to do it), you can read the main points of the conference here.

So, Google abandoned Nexus brand to start the Pixel one: the phone is quite powerful, has a good design and has reduced the gap with Samsung and Apple phones. New software features like Google Assistant and free cloud storage to store your photos at high resolutions make it a lot appealing to consumers. This is an image of two Pixel phones… cool, aren’t they?

Google Pixel phones… look at how the design is beautiful (image from The Verge)

With this new phone, the company has launched its new virtual reality platform, that is Daydream and its new headset, the Daydream View.

Microsoft Hololens: a little review

Yesterday has been a super-day: thanks to epic Microsoft MVP Marco Dal Pino (which is also Intel Black Belt and other 1000 stuff like that), I’ve tried Microsoft Hololens for some minutes! It’s been so cool, considering that in Italy there are only more or less 10 Hololens… I’ve been so lucky (thanks Marco, I love you!). I’m writing a little review here, since I’ve little time due to organization of our DTC event… after that I’ll write a more detailed review on our Immotionar website.