Virtual Reality

[Fuzzie]

I'm down in Melbourne for a couple of days. Today we visited the NGV and had a wander around the Triennial exhibitions. One of the exhibits is a virtual reality experience of a Pirate Ship. There are VR headsets handed out and you sit down and work your way around the ship looking around in essentially 3D.

I got as far as going down the steps to the first level and looking around and found a bench full of plans with 2 big mortise chisels on top. I attempted to pick them up, without success. But after a few attempts I started to feel particularly unwell. I was well and truly sea sick! I aborted the experience there and then and had to take quite a while outside before I recovered enough to continue, however I would say it took me another couple of hours before I was truly well again.

[pintek]

VR sickness is something that has to be experienced to be believed... and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone.

I am a bit of a tech enthusiast so purchased one of the VR headsets a couple of years ago from Oculus Rift - the DK2. Loved the experience until I played one game that gave me the reverse of motion sickness. My eyes said I was moving, but my brain was telling me I wasn't, my guts became the result and the scale of the conflict.

Since then the HTC Vive has been released - a room scale experience, so you can walk around and experience everything you see. No nausea at all. Worlds apart from where it started.
Sounds like they were using older tech for the exhibition.

[bueller]

Yeah these technologies have a long way to go but still very exciting stuff. Last few months my work has had me developing software for the Microsoft Hololens, had a blast working with it. It’s considered Augmented Reality rather than full VR but I actually think that’s a good thing as it lends itself to way more use cases. I want to write an app that will allow me to import 3D models of furniture designs I’m considering building. Then ideally I’d be able to modify the design on the fly once I can see it overlaid on the room it will live in.

Took me a good couple of weeks to get used to wearing the headset, the first week I’d get really bad eye strain and headaches if I used it longer than 15 minutes a day. Bit of calibration and some other tricks when using it and now I don’t seem to have any trouble though.