Learning VR (part 6)

As you can imagine, I am not only developing for VR but also testing a lot of things.
From hardware to software, I try my best to access many experimentation.

About the PlayStation VR

A few days ago, a friend of mine show me the PlayStation VR, and it is quite good.
The headset is very classic and the tracking — including PlayStation Move — was not easy to calibrate. But the main point in this headset is that we don't see the pixel grid, they use special optic, and it gives a blurry sensation, but it is not as bad as seeing the pixel of the screen. It is quite a good trick while waiting for better screen (and they are coming).

About vTime: a VR Social Network

On the software side I tested vTime the "VR social network".
The onboarding was very painful, requiring you to hop on and off from VR multiple times, one time was — sigh — to confirm your email address, who does that anyway?
Otherwise, the avatar setup experience was quite ok, it is like in The Sims.
After it continues to get frustrating, you must connect with "friends" but as you can imagine I don't have many friends using VR yet. So I randomly connected with people and I joined a conversation, it was very awkward to talk with these persons.
But I continued, to get the full experience, and there is a major difference between VR mode and "classic old chat" mode: it is the fact that you can not be passive because your "VR" body is here and people can look at you (as it is done in vTime).
It was not a pleasant experience for a person like me.

About 360 videos and Ads

I was watching a VR video, I can't remember which one but whatever.
It was on YouTube VR, and as usual this was kind of cool, very immersive and so on.
But here, in the middle of the video, I found myself blocked in a giant cube with an unrelated advertising video playing on the four walls. It was loud and I felt trapped. I was not able to look somewhere else (as you could do in real life) of course I could close my eyes, but the sound would continue. That was a horrible experience, I stopped YouTube (the only action I found at that time)

Progress

The keyboard is not here to type in the Google search field
(optical trick on this image)

The main subject of this session was to create a classic Android App that would let me test the bridge I created between Android and OpenGL/Unity without having to implement it in Unity every time.

Also, I experimented with a VR keyboard, it is only to anticipate new problematic due to keyboard usage. I'm hopping that google will soon release their official VR keyboard for Unity.

I worked on the keyboard event from views coming from Android, as usual it is not that simple, you have to intercept and forwards each event. This was not a success.
I guess I should wait a little for the official Google VR keyboard to pop :)

As usual, I've got a few emails asking me to get the WebView public or any kind of help. Unfortunately I am not an expert, and most of the time I can not help much.
For the rest of it, all the details are on this blog.

Next steps

I may take a break for one or two weeks on these reports as I'm waiting for the Google keyboard, so I can get more visual progress, and it will be more interesting for you. Don't worry I will continue to work — and learn — on VR.

Sponsorship

I'm looking for any kind of sponsorship, let it be hardware loan or money.
Because as an individual, it can be quite expensive to get some hardware to experiment things.