Virtual reality locomotion choice in games is not an option

Locomotion is one of the biggest issues in virtual reality: lots of alternatives with pros and cons for each choice have been provided, like:

• no locomotion (like in GearVR): just stay in a fixed place and don’t move, like when you look 360° videos;
• standard locomotion: you use keyboard or gamepad to move forward… very easy to understand but leads to motion sickness;
• teleportation (introduced by Vive): you just move immediately from one place to another. There’s no sickness, but it’s absolutely not natural;
• walk-in-place (like the one used in our full body VR solution ImmotionRoom): you move forward looking at the direction you want to move to and then walking in place in the real world to walk in the virtual world. This is smart since reduces a lot motion sickness, while being natural;
• Freedom locomotion system: like walk-in-place, but you define where to go using your thumb on the VR controller.
• Lots of others: really there are a bazillion locomotion options out there! Every day some new mechanics get invented

Moving with teleportation with Vive inside The Lab

Happy 8th of March, #WomenInVR

It’s the 8th of March and all over the world this is the International Women’s day. Here we’re used to gift some yellow flowers called mimosa and remember our beloved women why they’re important for us.

There’s lot of debate about women and technology and women and virtual reality. As always we men are much more, but in the field that I know best, VR, I know some really valuable women, like Eva Hoerth or Helen Situ, that are very important influencers. They usually use the tag #WomenInVR to help the spread of this wonderful technology among women, in a tech world populated by men.

Virtual Reality price is lowering, adoption is coming?

After GDC 2017, lots of things have changed in the VR world. Nothing unexpected, but lots of little big news that show how virtual reality ecosystem is evolving very fast.

One of the most interesting news has been the one of Oculus cutting 200$ for the price of Oculus Rift + Touch bundles. Since Touch cost is 199$, this practically means that if you buy a Rift, you get Touch controllers for free! Furthermore, if you want to buy an additional tracking sensor, you’ll get a discount of $20 on the previous price!

Oculus + Touch: I’ve spent too much money for these toys…

Oculus Tracker Update 1.12 makes Oculus a good guy again

After having criticized Oculus about its tracking issues and how its updates were making things even worse (unless you used Duct Tape, of course… duct tape fixes everything!), today I have to say “Bravo!” to its guys.

The new Update they’ve released for the Rift, the 1.12, seems to have fixed lots of stuff: as you can see from the release notes, a lot of work has been done to make tracking good again. The feedbacks from the users have been really positive and now reddit shows people writing “With 1.12 my room scale works” and so the virtual world is a happier place. Surely there will be people that will still experience errors and problems, but their number has been drastically lowered.

Microsoft virtual reality headsets are becoming real thanks to Acer

I have already dedicated some articles about the Microsoft virtual reality headsets because I’m very curious about them. Microsoft promised these cheap VR headsets that works out of the box with Windows 10 and that provide positional tracking without external cameras, claiming that they’re even better than Oculus or Vive! In January they revealed them, but until yesterday no one had ever tried them.

At GDC 2017, finally, the first Windows 10 VR headset has been presented: it is made by Acer and offers all characteristics that Microsoft has promised: good graphical quality, inside-out tracking and cheap price ($299).

Some selected journalists have been able to try the prototype (but they couldn’t shoot photos or videos, damn!) and the feedbacks are:

• It’s a bit like PSVR;
• It is tethered;
• It is not comfortable;
• Framerate is still 60fps;
• Blurred graphics;
• Seldomly the positional tracking has glitches;
• The experience sometimes crashes;
• The controller is a gamepad.
• It has flip-up display: meaning you can flip up the hmd just to return to the real world and flip it down again to go virtual (cool!);
• It has inside-out tracking, so it doesn’t require external cameras;

Gear VR 2017: remote is the new mouse

2 days ago with a post on its blog, Oculus announced the launch of the new Samsung Gear VR. As always, with respect to the older version it is more powerful, more comfortable, more epic, it has more compatible content and blah blah blah. Honestly despite all the marketing words, I’ve not seen that much innovation in the different versions of Gear VR: the only thing that truly changes is the phone that you put inside it and that gives more horsepower to the graphics you see inside virtual reality.

This year, finally, Samsung and Oculus have introduced a true innovation: the remote. Oh, well, actually this is not a true innovation, since something similar was already present inside Oculus CV1 and Daydream, but it’s surely an innovation for this headset. And you know, I love remotes: if  you’ve read my Daydream review, you know that I found it super-comfortable. Gear VR had to introduce it to not fall behind its competitor. Remote of Gear VR has 3-DOF so you can point objects and has 4 buttons and a touchpad to have super-easy interaction with the VR environment. If you’re thinking “it’s almost exactly like Daydream one”… yes, you’re right.

This handsome guy is trying a VR experience using Daydream and its 3DOF controller…

Vive reveals Tracker price and other stuff at MWC 2017

Yesterday finally we got to know the price of the Vive Tracker and all other add-ons Vive revealed at CES! If you forgot what I’m talking about, you can have a look at my wonderful previous post about it or you can go on to refresh your memory.

Basically Vive got lot of hype announcing the Vive Tracker, that is a single sensor that is tracked thanks to SteamVR Lighthouse system and through which you can obtain the position of a single point inside your VR environment with great precision. Tracker is wireless and works thanks to a battery. It streams data via USB (there is a USB dongle you have to put inside your PC ports). Thanks to Vive tracker you can track multiple objects inside your room (you just put a tracker attached to each object) or even the human body (you put trackers on the main joints of your body and obtain all the rest through inverse kinematics).

Monzo VR review: assembling model kits in VR is cool!

Some weeks ago I received an email from Madfinger Games that asked me to try their product MonzoVR. In the mail they defined their product in this way:

It’s called Monzo VR and it is something different than you might be used to.

It allows you to assemble and decorate a wide variety of models like animals, trucks, planes or even Da Vinci inventions.

It’s crazy, I know, but It’s also so cool to make all those things in ambient ZEN environments we prepared with LOVE.

I was perplexed… assemble models in VR? ZEN environments? LOVE?? What the hell are we talking about? A romantic adventure in ZEN environments when you assemble models with a girl you love?

As I always say, try something before judging it. So I downloaded the game and gave it a try on my Oculus Rift + Touch system (there’s also Gear VR version, if you’re interested).

When you launch MonzoVR, you find yourself inside a Japanese house (a Zen environment, as creators love to define it) and in front of you there is a table, with a model car box on it. A writing tells you to select the box to open it. This immediately got my curiosity… a box about a car model on a table… what are we going to do?

A talk about virtual reality adult entertainment with PornFoxVR founder

Some days ago I was contacted by Jeff Artik, that wanted to talk me about his VR porn website (NSFW link, of course), PornFoxVR.

I was a bit “scared” at first to check his website, not because porn scares me (at most has made me blind :D), but because usually porn websites come with all kind of malwares, pop-up windows coming from everywhere, fancy banners with girls that are at 3km from me that are super-interested in loving me and so on.

Xkcd on typical banners on adult websites…

He assured me that his website is clean, so I gave it a try and I sincerely liked its elegant and sleek design. Furthermore there were no pop-ups and no banners! (so, no more girls within 3km that are fallen in love with me? I feel so lonely now…). He got my interest, so I exchanged some e-mails with him. The following are some questions I’ve made him, with his answers… and my commentary.