Welcome

Welcome to the blog and the world of VR. I recently got an Oculus Go which is my first VR headset. I had never experienced VR before and was both blown away and frustrated by the VR experience. How is that possible? Well the quality of the available experiences varies wildly. Some made me feel like I was immersed in  a lifelike and beautiful world. Some made me feel like I was floating 50 feet above the ground trapped in a world of pixilated, low resolution giants.

The idea behind this blog is examine the many Go experiences to see which ones are worth viewing and why. There will be a rating for the quality of the image. Sadly some older videos are so poor that you can barely see what is being filmed. Very low resolution is like trying to watch an old video tape (remember those) on a 60 inch TV screen. Your Go has 2560 x 1440 resolution and since you are moving your head around to view 180 or 360 degrees, the movie or picture had better be recorded in high resolution or it will look terrible.

Another rating will be for scale. A stunning amount of pictures and video have what has been call the 'Amazon Lady' effect where you feel that your are trapped in a world of 50 foot tall people who have heads as big as your body. Sadly this is often the case even for content in the Facebook and Oculus apps. Almost all 360 still pictures suffer from this as do a surprising amount of videos.

Another rating will be for the length of the experience. Some like Amaze have tons of video content and you could spend much of a day watching it all, while others might have 10 minutes of stuff and then you are done. I'm not going to give exact times, just something like short, medium or long.

Then there will be a description of what the app is like. What sort of experience it gives and who might enjoy it. There won't be a grade for this as what might thrill me might bore you to tears. Hopefully this will be enough information to point you to the best experiences in the VR world and maybe help you avoid some of the disappointments.