Virtual reality is coming, that much was clear when Oculus Rift soared past its crowd-funding goal and then was swiftly snapped up by Facebook for a cool $2 billion (£1.32bn) last year. While Oculus is still a little way away from releasing a finished product onto the market, there are already a number of ways to experience virtual reality right now, and thanks to our friends at RED5, we’ve got a Vizor VR headset to try out just in time for Christmas.
The Vizor VR works in pretty much the same way as Google Cardboard, in that it is basically a case for your smartphone, which is what does the technological heavy lifting.
Google offers a guide on how to make a basic Cardboard viewer by cutting out some boxes and attaching some lenses and this will work fine. However, as the Vizor VR is made out of custom-moulded plastic, has adjustable lenses, and offers a snug and comfy fit with soft foam against your face, it blocks out far more external light and thus offers a more immersive experience.
The Vizor VR is not an official Google Cardboard headset, and so there is no QR code to scan with your phone for optimal setup with the Google Cardboard app, but the default settings worked fine with the Sony Xperia Z Compact and Samsung Galaxy S5 we tried it on.
And the Google Cardboard app really is where the magic happens – as soon as you load the app on your phone and start looking around for content, all the 360 videos that have been uploaded to YouTube in recent months will finally make sense. No longer are you hindered by clicking on those ugly up and down controls on your laptop screen, you can now be fully immersed in some breath-taking scenes.
You can now experience the high speed thrill of driving an F1 car, flying a plane, jumping off a cliff in a wingsuit, or explore the Death Star from Star Wars without leaving your sofa.
The experience is not just for entertainment either, as news companies look to make their stories more immersive. The Associated Press (AP) have just release their first foray into the 360 world with a video at The Jungle migrant camp in Calais. They have partnered with RYOT on the video, a LA production company that won awards for its 360 exploration of the devastation in Nepal after the earthquake earlier this year.
The 360 technology also lets you explore the world, with Google’s Stretview – where you can now type in an address or postcode for nearly any location on earth and suddenly experience the view as if you were standing right there, whether that is London, New York, a Sydney beach, or the Sahara Desert.
360 is here to stay, and the Vizor VR is a great way to get your first experience of it as the technology matures and immersive experiences become more mainstream. And at under £25 it becomes an ideal Christmas gift for the person in your life that likes embracing new technologies.