Life Is Not Fiction

I love fiction books and stories.
I read them constantly and escape into their worlds.
Some are tragic, some are uplifting, some are eye-opening, some are poetic, many are all of these.
But there is no book in existence that defines our lives here in the real world.
We are not living in “1984”.
This is not the world of “Atlas Shrugged”.
We are not headed for “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”.
“The Holy Bible” didn’t actually happen.
LISTEN TO YOURSELVES when you take florid prose or psychological allegory and try to apply it like a secret decoder ring of the world we live in today. NOTHING is like that. Not all of (this personality type) will do (this kind of thing) every time. We are not protagonists and antagonists. We are not heroes and villains.

This is real life. We are people. We are not fiction. We are real, and every single one of us, right down to the person you may hate with every fiber of your being, is a living person with a perspective on life and a reason to hold that perspective.

Always keep reading books.
Never assume you are living in them.

Except for Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson nailed that shit.

More later.

Foundation Road – The Transition

I shove something soft into a nearly-full container. I apply an aggravated force to the thrust. It is all a blur. All I know for sure is that I am in motion, and that I am preparing for a journey.

“You can’t go,” a woman says in a fearful tone. It is nearly a whisper from behind me. I am not even sure that is what she said.

I stop what I am doing and look down at my hands. My vision is still too blurred to make out any details around me. “You know I have to,” I reply in a language I do not fully comprehend. I continue to…

—

Ear-splitting screams are coming from all directions. I believe these are not human screams. They are just sounds caused by the intensity of what is happening around me. I know what it is, but I cannot articulate it. Streaks of light and color and tingling pain invade my senses. I try to look around, but I cannot be entirely sure that my eyes are working at all. I can feel myself look down, but I see no body to support me, nor any indication that my line of sight has changed.

—

It is dark, but tactile and worldly. I feel seasons begin. I might be deep underground now. The warmth turns to a deep cold that lasts much longer than it should for a season. I understand it. The warm weather eventually returns, and I feel myself rise to the surface.

I am Temen of Harran.

LG G3 VR Extensive Review #1

I love virtual reality. Stereoscopic 3D vision, stereo/surround sound, full immersion. That’s the stuff for me.

So I thought it was just the right time to do a full reboot on my Keeping it Virtual page and go over my first impressions of the LG G3 VR set.

The LG G3 VR is a simple 3-part plastic case that is designed to turn your LG G3 phone into a pair of low-budget VR goggles. It is based on the Google Cardboard products, and it was designed due to the LG G3 not being very compatible with most of the Cardboard specs out there today. It was a smart move on their part, although I strongly disagree with whatever reason they have for not selling them separately. I would not go buy a new G3 just to get a free piece of plastic.

I have looked over many reviews of Google Cardboard and the G3 VR. Few of them are extensive, and even fewer of them offer any actual thoughts on the specs and operation beyond monosyllabic filler statements. I don’t care if you thought it was “cool”, I want to know more.

So… I managed to acquire the G3 VR for my phone, and I’m going to do what I can to post multiple reviews as I try things out in “budget-virtual-reality”, time permitting.

The Basics

You don’t care about the basics. If you’re here, you probably already know the highly publicized details of the G3 VR and Google Cardboard. If you don’t, go google it. There’s already a thousand half-assed reviews and videos out there. I’m not going to waste my time or yours with common-knowledge brochure points in this article.

Your Face

The G3 VR does not come with a headstrap. Since it uses a slider-button on the side of the unit, the vast majority of the time you use it, you won’t need to strap it to your head. You’ll be holding it to your face for somewhat short and minimally interactive experiences. If you do want a strap (such as for viewing full movies in a virtual theater), I will make three important suggestions:

1. Don’t spend much. You can get a pair of plastic safety goggles at Wal-Mart for less than three dollars, remove the band, and double-knot it onto the strap slots in the G3 VR. Works just fine.

2. Buy a small piece of foam or roll up a piece of cloth and tuck it between your nose and the VR unit. It’s a hard plastic edge, and having that lashed to your melon is going to get uncomfortable real fast.

3. Don’t turn quickly. G3VR is three pieces that snap together with very small plastic knobby-doos. If you’re not holding onto it with your hands and turn your head fast, the whole unit will separate, and the last 3D visual experience you will have is watching your LG G3 sail off into oblivion. If you’re paranoid about this, use tape or a rubber band to lash the unit together. Both of the latter techniques will get inconvenient in a hurry, unfortunately, since you’ll need to regularly open it back up to perform functions on the phone and/or switch apps. I recommend just being careful, and maybe using a headstrap in a well-carpeted area.

Stereoscopic 3D

True 3D is important in a VR experience. If you just have a screen strapped to your eyeballs, it’s no different than… well, strapping a screen to your eyeballs. Just watch TV or something. But to get a sense of immersion, you need stereoscopic 3D. That means the visual being sent to your left eye is slightly different than the one sent to your right eye, giving you a sense of depth in the VR. It is a very difficult thing to get right on any VR unit, and it is ironically the one thing that always seems to be overlooked by people when they talk about VR. This is where the G3VR gets varying results.

The first and biggest flaw is the fact that there is no Google Cardboard qr code to calibrate G3VR, and there is no app that will set it up for you. It is fortunate that G3VR is already set up quite well, but not every app is going to look right.

There are some apps that I have tried that seem to have stereoscopic images nailed down perfectly. Tuscany Dive and Village for Google Cardboard are two very well-calibrated experiences, the 3D is intense at both near and deep fields.

Other apps, such as Cosmic Roller Coaster, are not calibrated well, where very nearby objects will split apart as they get closer to you, completely destroying the sense of immersion. Some don’t seem like 3D at all, likely because the screens are inverted (right eye getting the left image, etc). This would not be a problem if there were adjustment settings either in the phone or in the app that allowed you to tweak the view, but there never is one. Every app I’ve tried lacks any settings to calibrate the 3D. It’s pretty mind-boggling that none of the developers thought to include such a feature, especially considering that they needed to calibrate their software for testing anyway. It seems like it would be a relatively easy thing to implement into any app. But I am no programmer, and I certainly haven’t tried ALL the apps yet. Maybe there’s a good reason.

The Twitch

Some apps are nice and smooth, but some suffer from a twitch. InMind VR is a VERY cool game where you are floating around in a human brain zapping bad neurons, but it’s almost unplayable for me with G3VR due to the image twitching to a different angle constantly. A few other apps do this to varying degrees, where you’ll look one way and suddenly you’re facing a full 180 degrees in the other direction. I fault the G3 for that, but I do hope there’s a fix that may yet be released in some of these apps to lessen it. Bad gyro, bad!

The Drift

Some apps will drift a bit; if you stare in one direction, you’ll notice the whole world very slowly starts to shift to the right, forcing you to turn to maintain your view. This could get severely annoying in some experiences without a swivel chair and an open area around you. The brief searches I’ve done on this issue yield an odd result: it is apparently a combination of the head-tilt function of the phone’s gyro sensors combined with the magnet-button on the left side of G3VR that cause some displays to creep slowly to the right.

The Fun

Looks like I’ve spent this entire article talking about all the bad things about the LG G3 VR. How about some good things! First and foremost, it is SERIOUSLY fun!! All minor issues aside, having a full head-tracking VR unit that costs next to nothing and uses only the power of my phone is simply genius. I’m not going to list all the great apps yet, because I’m still going through so many and there are already tons of “top 10” lists out there, but I will definitely formulate my own favorites into a list of reviews for a future post.

The Field of View

I was amazed at the peripheral vision emulated by G3VR / Google Cardboard. No, you don’t have peripheral vision strictly speaking, since you’re looking through a pair of lenses, but it fools your eyes wonderfully. Each eye’s screen is warped into a fish-eye bubble view and then passed through the lenses to make it feel like the world is truly wrapped around you. For the full 360-degree experiences, I strongly recommend (again) sitting in a swivel chair with enough room to spin around without breaking things.

Head Tracking

Before G3VR, I was never impressed with the gyro sensors in the LG G3. Various apps I’ve used (such as Google Sky) make it feel jerky and never seem to think you’re facing in the direction that you are. These inconsistencies all but disappeared with LG G3 VR usage. Most of the worlds have VERY smooth head-tracking. Minus the occasional twitching in some apps and the low framerate in others, it’s really eerie how well the phone tracked my head movement.

More Later

That’s it for now. Fairly extensive review of the bugs and fun with LG G3 VR / Google Cardboard. Further addendums and reviews and stuff whenever I feel so inspired. Maybe a couple app lists.

More later…