By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Virtual reality is ready for Christmas-morning reality.
Buzz about VR has been building for years, but you can't stay up
all Christmas Eve waiting to rip open a box of hype. Now a Star
Trekkish gadget from Samsung and Oculus called the Gear VR makes a
compelling VR experience available under your tree for just
$100.
The Gear VR is the first 360-degree entertainment system that
feels accessible and slick, rather than awkward and sickening. If
you've only tried freebie VR experiences like Google Cardboard,
it's worth giving it a second shot with this.
Gear VR reminds me of the Atari 2600, that affordable game
console that brought Pac-Man home. Right out of the box, Gear VR
makes it easy to access a surprisingly wide universe of games,
videos, journalism and even immersive theater experiences, all
curated by VR pioneer Oculus. And without the need for jumbo-sized
headsets and price tags, Samsung's new hardware addresses much of
what made earlier VR headgear uncomfortable.
There are some constraints. To use Gear VR, you will need one of
this year's compatible Samsung smartphones, like the Galaxy S6 or
Note 5. The phone mounts on the high-tech ski goggles to transform,
like Voltron, into a VR machine that pumps images straight into
your eyes.
You won't mistake what you see in there for reality--you can
clearly make out pixels, like when you'd sit too close to an old
tube TV. Yet using the Gear VR for a week, I frequently found
myself getting wrapped up in its virtual worlds, for longer and
longer stretches.
That's thanks, in part, to great strides from Samsung and Oculus
in combating the urge to hurl. The nausea, which has made VR
largely disappointing to date, is caused by herky-jerky scenery
that doesn't match what your brain is expecting. Inside the
headset, you're bounding this way and that, but your inner ear and
your eyes are reporting different things.
But unlike other phone-goggle contraptions, the Gear VR headset
has its own motion sensors, so it does a much better job of
tracking your head movements when you're turning or looking up. And
it pushes the Samsung phone's processor to cut motion delay to
under 20 milliseconds, reducing the nausea-inducing blur. (My test
Galaxy S6 Edge Plus worked so hard when mounted, it could blow
through its huge battery with an hour or two of intensive VR.)
Other improvements also make Gear VR much more comfortable: The
headset itself is less heavy--slimmed 19% from an experimental
headset Samsung debuted last year. You can comfortably fit glasses
inside, and there's also a focus adjustment that makes the view
more pleasurable for aging eyes.
Yet there's still some discomfort. Wearing anything on your face
for an hour can get old. Also, I occasionally encountered what
appeared to be a flicker in the brightest parts of the screen.
(Samsung says that's rare, and has to do with the way my brain
processes the screen refresh itself.)
The fact that using this can result in fatigue is a testament to
how much you can actually do inside a Gear VR. My biggest surprise
was how much real content there is now--well over 100 apps in the
Oculus store, with 40 coming in the next few months. After a week
using it, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. You can
watch LeBron James practice, tour the world's beaches, even watch
Netflix on a TV in a ski chalet. Not all of this content is unique
to the Gear VR, but the Oculus interface you use to browse and buy
it makes it easy.
There are lots of enhanced shoot-em-up games, as you'd expect,
but there are also experiences that are exclusive to VR. In "Land's
End," for example, you float through a beach landscape to unlock
puzzles. It's the most Zen virtual experience I've ever had.
Directors are also figuring out how to use 360-degree video for
a theater-like experience. My favorite, from an app called VRSE,
lets you visit the set of "Saturday Night Live" during its 40th
anniversary special. You can spin around to watch Jerry Seinfeld's
monologue and the celebrity reactions. (Don't miss Sarah Palin in
the audience.)
Oculus also works to keep you away from bad experiences, vetting
what goes into its store. On top of that, it adds a "comfort"
rating to each app, like a Yelp for queasiness.
Rival phone VR headsets lose their immersive quality because
they don't have good ways to let us select, view menus and do
things other than look around. The Gear VR adds a touchpad on the
right side that's equally useful for scrolling through movie titles
and zapping alien spaceships, though it takes a little getting used
to.
If you buy a Gear VR, there's one necessary piece of equipment
that doesn't come included: A chair that can spin 360 degrees. If
you don't have one at home, you'll miss out on a lot of what's
going on, or just keep accidentally racking your shins on the
coffee table.
The Gear VR is a no-brainer if you already have one of this
year's compatible Samsung phones. If you're an iPhone owner and
don't want to switch, you can get close to the comfort of Gear VR
with a VR One headset from Carl Zeiss. But you're on your own for
curating and downloading compatible apps.
There are a lot of reasons to be excited about this new virtual
world, but it's important to understand what the Gear VR can't do.
Limited by a phone's processing power, storage and screen, it can't
play complex games. You can wear wireless headphones, but it isn't
a surround-sound experience. Those are the kinds of experiences we
can expect from Oculus's own Rift hardware when it debuts sometime
next year.
And even the most impressive VR content is a work in progress.
Max Cohen, Oculus's vice president of mobile, told me he thinks of
the Gear VR less like an Atari, and more like the first game
consoles, from the early 1990s, that were capable of 3-D graphics.
In those days, game makers didn't know how far off in the distance
to draw objects, or what a first-person experience should be
like.
Today, VR content makers are learning what kinds of immersive
experiences feel right, like moving in straight lines instead of up
and down. "We are still figuring out the medium," Mr. Cohen told
me.
Based on what I've already seen with Gear VR, though, I'm ready
to strap in for the ride.
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 20, 2015 09:18 ET (14:18 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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