Nauseating. At this point I'm fairly used to using the GearVR without getting motion sickness quickly. The cardboards don't even scar me, apparently. But the Oculus, wow. That said, the video quality seems better. This may be due to the demos used though, I'm not sure yet.
Now this whole thing is on the DK2, of course. Just for your own reference.
As a comparison the Oculus is definitely less painful on the nose. The headbands are not as good though (maybe that's related?).
I really like that the original image is shown on screen as well. You feel so lost guiding somebody else when you don't see what they're seeing. It's like helping your mom browsing a website over the phone. With the Oculus SDK this experience is much better.
The wires. Well, the wires aren't cool. With the GearVR you can sit in a rotating chair and really go 360. That's a no go with the Oculus because the wires tangle up. There's only two wires, joined, coming out. You don't really feel it while using the Oculus, but it does limit you.
The Oculus is lighter than the GearVR. Well, I guess that's not entirely true. The empty GearVR is quite light. So if you count the computer that's doing the rendering on both devices... well let's say I didn't put it in a PI ;)
The default demo app has a keyboard full of toggles built in. I love that. It allows you to demonstrate certain features, like low FPS, wire frames, latency, etc. While purely interesting for engineering or development reasons, I really dig that sort of thing. I'm sure it'll also help me get a better understanding of writing VR stuff myself.
So this weekend I've written a poc where WebGL takes a 2d canvas app and applies the barrel distortion. I think it's only a bridge since I foresee that effect being applied in CSS and I'm still sure that at some point WebVR will just take some parameters and render any canvas on a generic (mobile) screen. But that'll take time.
In the mean time I've been trying to configure that barrel distortion such that it makes sense. Apply too high a factor and everything gets bent too much. The lenses don't compensate for it. But when I remove the effect it feels alright, as if it's not even necessary. I haven't really had time to experiment with it further but I figured it may have something to do with the field of view (fov) being too low. I can imagine it more useful or even needed when you render at a high fov. So I'll try that next.
But first I wanna try and get WebVR up and running, now that I've got an actual device that'll be recognized by it. So far I've only been playing with mobile-only demos. I feel that's gonna be important due to being able to spread it easily, but I'm certainly not underestimating a heavy desktop as rendering platform (but oh teh latency).
For me WebVR means something like "render 3d VR demos in the browser so you can run it on any platform, desktop or mobile alike, regardless of an actual VR device present". Mind you, that's not exactly what WebVR is. Not yet, anyways :) But I like that in spirit.
Ok, let's sleep off that nausea. It seems worse in evenings when it's dark. I wonder if Meniere has any influence on it, even if it's lumbering... :/ Oh man, that could really ... ok ok back to thinking happy thoughts!