I have seen many stores advertising build-your-own head sets for Virtual Reality. These shells sometimes cost as little as $7. All you have to do is download some Virtual Reality apps and place your phone into the cardboard or plastic shell and you have yourself you're own pair of googles. I tried this out to see what kind of experience i thought it presented.
Experience 1: Walking through a Space Station.
At first looking through the goggles i did get a thrill as it was something i did not experience very often and was pretty exciting. Because the rest of your vision is blocked out your sight is solely encapsulated by the image in front of you. This was interesting as it did give you the feeling that your body had been left behind somewhere and your mind was in a space ship. The best thing about this experience i think was the movement aspect where if you clicked a button on your phone you could walk around the space and go to different areas. This made the immersive space more convincing. However i still had no urge to touch or investigate things like i would if:
1 - I didn't have to hold the goggles to my face.
2 - The speed of the camera was fitted to a human walking speed.
Because the space didn't have any interaction elements either, after a while it was quite boring and i wouldn't probably play again.
Experience 2: Seoul 360 RollerCoaster at Seoul Grand Park
This experience was quite nauseating. The view from the googles was confusing as the screen wasn't split into two view points for each eye using the goggles. The experience was more convincing than the space station however because the experience required no movement. Like on a roller coaster you can not get up to move around, the experience was much similar to that. The connection to the physical experience and the virtual in relation to the body i felt was more similar. However there is still such a presence in the cardboard head set itself. The cardboard against my face was hard to ignore and demanded a lot of my attention. I think that this did mean that i wasn't as engaged in looking around in the experience and taking in my surroundings. The shaking in the video was much like an experience you might feel through the object of a roller coaster and the mechanics you feel so there was a connection to the vision you might have. The sound of the video was a good combination to make you feel points of suspense and fear. I didn't feel disembodied in the sense that i felt fearful of being in a potential dangerous physical condition.
Experience 3: 360 underwater National Park - National Geographic.
This experience was the least convincing of the experiences i had with VRtube. The narration over the video made it much more similar to something you would experience at a museum with a room full of people, much more like viewing through a screen. Also the distance between the relationship between the body being out of water and the mind being underwater was extremely obvious and i didn't really feel immersed in the underwater experience at all.
Experience 4: Grand Canyon Experience
This video was quite entertaining as it had stories from peoples opinion of the grand canyon and a virtual body speaking to you about the space next to you. I have never been to the grand canyon but something about this experience makes me think that i may be able to recognise it if i encountered images of it now. There was movement in the 3D space and two screens for each eye to focus. Some of the scenes however were confused by my other senses for example in a scene where there was a lot of light and open space i would have expected my body to feel a sense of warmth but obviously there was not. - Might be interesting to try these experiences out in more similar physical spaces to test their immersive quality.
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