The author, taking a selfie while using the Gear VR in a situation with utterly terrible lighting. One demo even put me in the pilot seat of a Pacific Rim Jaeger, where I duked it out with a Kaiju. The latter made me jump when I turned to the left and saw a guy in weird makeup staring right into the camera and waving at me. Oculus also showed off a repository of 360 degree videos and photos, such as one where I watched a guy play music in his home studio or a brief clip of a circus performance. That’s not to say the rest of the Gear VR demos were bad though. I’m excited for a future where I can load up Netflix in my Rift or Gear VR and watch a film like it’s in a private movie theater on the moon.įurther reading: Q&A: Gaming legend and Oculus CTO John Carmack talks VR gaming’s past, present, and future Now, who knows what business model Oculus Cinema will launch with, and how you’ll be able to purchase IMAX-quality films, but the Gear VR’s 1440 resolution and light weight made it so watching a full film with that device strapped to my face no longer seemed like a fool’s errand. Another set of demos let me watch films on a full IMAX screen, and because of the Oculus’s built-in 3D capabilities I was even able to watch Hubble 3D (which I’ve seen in a real IMAX theater multiple times) with all its 3D effects preserved.Īnd I did it for free. Other demos allowed me to watch films in super-widescreen, as if I were watching a movie stretched across three computer monitors. All feature dynamic lighting reflections, so you get a sense of these settings being realistic from the way light bounces off the seats or lunar rocks.īut standard cinema, even in fantastical environments, is just a start. You can watch films in a standard cinema experience, a home theater, or on the friggin’ moon with Earth circling above. I didn’t watch a full film on the device, if only because there were no full films loaded, but I did watch a dozen or so trailers. Every time you want to do anything outside the Rift (like launch a new demo), you’re forced to pull the headset off and mess around on your PC monitor. Using the DK2 Rift is still a cumbersome process. That last part is important because Gear VR has one huge feature that I now desperately hope makes it into the consumer Rift model-basic controls mounted on the headset. The Note 4 clicks into the casing with a simple push, and from there it’s the same old Rift tradition: Put on Rift, put on headphones, put controller on your lap so you can find it later. It’s basically just a plastic headband with a Galaxy Note 4 phablet strapped to the front, so it feels a lot less cumbersome than the DK2 (though the lighter-feeling Crescent Bay prototype comes close). It helps that Gear VR is incredibly lightweight. If Samsung’s implementation of VR were wrong, I would’ve lasted five to ten minutes at most before being hit with nausea.įurther reading: Oculus open-sources original Rift developer kit And as we said earlier, you’ll need a Samsung smartphone to use the Gear VR.If you’ve used either of the two Rift development kits (affectionately termed DK1 and DK2), you already know that’s a fairly impressive figure. Your source PC will of course need to be running on Windows 8.1 or higher. You can get the Virtual Desktop from the Oculus Store for just $9.99. There are probably some other things they need to develop to make it more seamless and easier to connect so expect to see more features and improvements soon. You will still need to have the Streamer app on your PC in order to mirror it onto your Gear VR or Oculus Go. You can also just use it as a regular computer if you feel like it. You can also play games if you have a Bluetooth game controller. One reason to use this would be to stream a movie or video that will play better when watched through VR technology. You just need a WiFi network, preferably one that is as fast as 5GHz since you will probably be streaming a lot of data between your computer and your VR headset. What’s new now is that you don’t need cables in order to mirror it. Now if you have an untethered headset like the Oculus Go and the Gear VR (you need a Samsung smartphone for the latter of course), you can mirror your PC onto your headset. It’s also pretty expensive for a software, at $13.99 for the former and $14.99 for the latter. The Virtual Desktop software has actually been around for a while now but previously it could only support the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.
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