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).

Oculus Rift vs GearVR

After having talked you about the headset you should buy and having made a detailed comparison of GearVR vs Cardboard, today I want to highlight the difference between Oculus Rift and Samsung GearVR.

Both headsets are high-end ones and both are produced with Oculus technologies. The key difference is that the first one is a high-end tethered headset, while the second one is a high-end mobile headset. That is, the first one has to be connected to a VR-ready PC (through HDMI and USB port), while the second one is a piece of plastic that works when you put your Samsung phone inside it.

Samsung GearVR and its companion phones… if you use Note7, game explosions have never been so real!(Image by Oculus)

3 Things We Need To Get Better At While Working With VR

Today I’m proud to host here a post written by Marvin, a great VR passionate from England, owner of blog Moments in VR and of a great VR Youtube channel. I invite you to see his great work… but before that let’s all read his new post! Let’s go Marvin!

Virtual Reality is here. It’s new (almost), it’s exciting and It still has a long way to go.

No matter how we look at it, we’re only scratching the surface of this new technology and it’s close cousins Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality

Before we go any further let’s define just what these technologies are.

I preordered the Oculus Touch!!!

Yesterday evening has been a great moment for me… I preordered my Oculus Touch, reserving my front seat having been one of the people that pre-ordered the Rift CV1 in January!

As we already know, I paid them 199€… and I hope they will be great! My controllers will arrive in December, so I’ll have something to do during my Christmas vacations… 😉

And you, have you preordered your Touch Controllers? Have you ever tried them? Let me know in the comments section!

 

Highlights of Oculus Connect 3

Some days ago I wrote a blog post about what to expect from the Oculus Connect 3, the greatest Oculus event of the year. I made some predictions… and I got right with three and a half out of five! Am I a magician? Well, it would be cool, but actually it’s only matter of being informed on the VR world and just being a bit visionary… even if the magician story is the one I actually tell girls to impress them:)

Ok, so… what have been the most important announcements of Oculus Connect 3? Oculus has made a short recap on its blog and I want to enhance it with some thoughts.

Virtual sickness: it depends on age or sex?

Some days ago I published this article about motion sickness. I shared it on Linkedin groups where I got in touch with a very interesting man, Steven Aukstakalnis, that gave me more info about this topic. He gave me some references and I started doing some researches with them and through Wikipedia. It has been very interesting and I want to share some info I got during this process. Obviously this article won’t be a complete review on motion sickness, but will provide some useful hints. If you want, there is a lot of research papers out there that you can read: people are researching on virtual sickness since a lot (some articles date in the 80s). I wonder if these researches from long time ago still hold today, when the headsets are completely different, but this is just another topic. Before beginning, to show my kindness to Steven, I want to say that he’s written a great book, Practial Augmented Reality, with this and many other considerations on AR and VR.

Oculus Connect 3: what to expect from it?

From 5th to 7th of October, Oculus will hold its annual event in San José, California: the Oculus Connect. It will be a day where super-smart people (like god-like programmer John Carmack or super smart-man Michael Abrash) will hold super-interesting talks and where Oculus will make lots of important announcements.

It will be an event totally worth to be seen. The talks of Oculus Connect are always interesting… look at this one made by Michael Abrash some times ago when he talked about illusions perceived by our brains:

But the thing we are waiting the most are the announcements. What will Oculus announce? We don’t know… but we can make some speculations. And I hope you will speculate with me in the comments, saying your predictions about the next Oculus Connect!

How to reduce motion sickness in virtual reality

Today I’ll talk about another one of the most frequently asked questions on reddit: after having talked about about if you have to buy a VR headset, which one you should buy and how to start developing with it, today I’ll talk about how to overcome the motion sickness in VR.

The typical scenario is this one: some smart guy reads a lot about VR and feels the urge to try this awesome technology, so he/she buys a brand new PC, a brand new headset (like Oculus or Vive), starts using it and… he starts feeling bad: nausea, dizziness, headaches. In short, he/she just spent 2000$ to buy some illness… it isn’t that cool!