Virtual Reality… is it worth it?

So about a year and a half ago, my 9 year old was dying for an Oculus Quest virtual reality headset for his 10th birthday.  Me being a total geek, I am usually totally on board with this kind of stuff.  But I had played with some different VR goggles, mostly the Google Cardboard (yes that is a brand name) style that uses your phone as the screen and puts some plastic lenses in for you to be able to focus in at close range.  They were pretty cool as a first jump into the VR world, but very clunky to operate and kind of uncomfortable.  I had bought several versions of that type.  Some were literally made of cardboard, some of hard plastic, others were made of soft foam with a slot for your phone to slide in, kind of like VR Crocs.  Each one was better than the last as far as comfort, but the screen images weren’t great, you had to take off the headset to interact with your phone to start the different VR apps.  And god forbid you get a call in the middle of a VR session, it would make you cross eyed looking at the picture and text on the screen an inch in front of your face.  Let’s just leave it at… it wasn’t great.  So I was highly suspect of another VR headset, especially at $300.  Let me be the first to say, I was totally wrong.  These VR goggles are freaking incredible, and I still say that, now 18 months after we bought them.  Now ours is an Oculus Quest version 1, the version 2 rolled out before Christmas and is supposedly even better, faster, and higher definition (and cheaper).

Why are they so great?

They are completely immersive.  You forget where you are, what time it is, and everything in the “real” world.   The first time you put these on, it puts you in the lobby of the system.  Which on mine was a geodesic dome ski lodge with lots of skylights, a roaring fire, and snow falling outside of the windows.  I was pretty content just sitting in there watching the shooting stars, but then you get to do stuff!

There is a ton of content.  All of the content is downloaded through the headset itself or the accompanying phone app.  A large portion of the game library is paid content, like games or other VR apps.  But there is also a huge library of free content in the Oculus store and online via the built-in web browser or you can download the Firefox browser if you prefer.  You can get on YouTube and watch VR content directly from the web for free as well as from many other online video platforms.  And as I said, there are a ton of free apps in the Oculus store.  Many of them are educational or documentary style, which are very well produced and very entertaining.

Other free app include a ton of social apps which allow you to engage with real people in a virtual world using your avatar as the representation of you.  It is a far cry from anything in the movie Ready Player One, but if that’s your thing, you may like it.  There is even a new free app called Arthur which allow you to do team collaborations in a virtual office space.  Which means you could write this thing off as a business expense! (consult your tax professional)

Of all of the free apps on the store, I find that I spend most of the time on the video services.  As you might expect, the big video streaming services have apps for the Oculus platform too.  Which on the surface seems kind of silly, why would I want to watch Coming 2 America on Amazon Prime on a tiny screen an inch in front of my face when I can watch it on a 65 inch LED screen on my wall?  Because in VR, you are sitting in a movie theater.  The screen is 2 stories tall, the lights are dimmed on the wall, you can look around and see the velvet on the empty seat next to you. It is totally insane.  There are also apps for FoxNow, Sling, PlutoTV, Netflix, YoutubeVR, Showtime, and Fandango.  You have the option to go to the website of any of the other streaming services and watch their content in a browser.  This can be a life saver if your spouse falls asleep before you do and wants you to turn off the TV because it is too bright.  Or, as in my case, your spouse likes to watch horrible sappy love stories and reality shows, this can be the gift you give them so you can have the TV back. (I love you honey!).

There are also plenty of demos of the paid games, so you can get a feel of the title before you buy it.  Usually you get a full chapter or scene of a game, which is enough to tell you about it so you can make a good decision.

We got the demo of the fighting game Super Hot which is sort of like a mannequin fighting game with a twist.  If you stand still, time stands still, so you can look around to see who is attacking you and get ready to make the next move.  I wasn’t sure about it at first, but loved it in the demo and we ended up buying it.

They are easy to use

The headset comes with the 2 controllers that you navigate the virtual environment with.  They fit in your hands very comfortably with a couple buttons under your thumb, and the main selection button under your index finger on the handle.  It works so intuitively, it is really hard for me to explain.  It just works like you would think it would work for the most part.  You may need to click one of the thumb buttons to exit a game or the selected menu, but generally, it just works.

You can expand the use of them by connecting them to a gaming PC. 

We recently figured out that you can plug the headset in to a gaming PC and use it to get VR content from the computer to the headset.  The setup on it is probably beyond the scope of this post, but I’ll address it in an upcoming post.  But what this means is that you can access content from huge gaming platforms like Steam and others who have free and paid content to further expand the use of the headset.

They are safe to use

When you first turn on the headset, it makes you draw a safe perimeter around you using a “laser” coming out of the handsets and the cameras on the outside of the headset.  If you get too close to the perimeter, it will pause your session and show you where you are, so you don’t bump into the coffee table or the TV.  Now one limitation of the system is that it doesn’t detect when things enter the perimeter.  So if, for instance, if your 10 year old son is playing a boxing game in the hotel room and your wife sits down at the desk to put on her makeup, she is in danger of being punched in the back without warning…. hypothetically.  In this example everyone was okay and the only person on the floor was me laughing uncontrollably, again, hypothetically.

They are fun for the whole family

Everyone in our family has had time to enjoy the headset and we all use it in our own way.  My sons play games, my wife likes the documentaries and Streaming TV services.  I like watching movies.  It really is a great addition to our game room.

The price keeps coming down

At the time of this blog, you can get the Version 2 for as low as $299 and they even have some factory refurbished Version 1 headsets for $199.  That has me thinking about getting another one just for me.

The downside (if there is one)

I am really struggling to come up with downside to this product.  The truth is that I really love it.  If I had to say something, it would be this.  I wish that they had some sort of family plan for games.  We had talked about buying another one for our oldest son, but found out that you cannot have 2 headsets playing the same game at the same time on the same account.  SO they wouldn’t be able to play against each other unless we set up another account.  But then we would have to buy all of the games under that account too.  I wish that you could set up a “parent’ account and “child” accounts so that you could share content within a family.  Because I am notoriously cheap.

The second thing that I can think of, and this is really stretching it calling it a problem, but it is tough to use in the car.  I don’t mean that you should be driving and using this or Kung-Fu kicking in the back seat, but I thought it would be a great idea to watch a movie in the headset while my wife is driving.  Because trying to watch a movie on my tablet in the sunlight produces so much glare that it is difficult to watch (#FirstWorldProblems).  So I thought with the headset on, I could stream a movie through my phone’s hotspot (or you can even copy movies to the hard drive on the headset from your computer via USB).   But my plan was foiled by the headset being so technologically advanced.  As we drove through the winding highways of the Great Smoky Mountains, I learned that the headset thought I was turning, not the car.  So as we would through the mountains, the movie screen would twist and turn, making it hard to watch.  There is a button that you can press to make it re-center, but that was a pain and killed the movie experience.  Maybe they have that fixed in version 2, but if not, I’ll live… probably.

So what’s the difference in the Version 1 and Version 2?