It's been just a few days and I've already been able to wow more people with VR through Gear VR than in the last month with the Oculus Rift DK2. Mobility is one of Gear VR's biggest assets; at times, it feels like a DK2 in your pocket. I've showed Gear VR to family, taken it to friend's houses, used it in the car, and even while eating sushi. But mobility isn't the only place where Gear VR shines; the device undoubtedly represents the most complete and polished VR user experience to date. See Also: Samsung Gear VR Detailed Review: Part One – Design Comparison to Oculus Rift DK2 If you're an Oculus Rift user, you know the drill. Find a cool demo somewhere online, download it. Is it the latest version? Who knows. Should you run it in Direct or Extended mode? Who knows. Is there a Mac version? What's the reorient button? What controls does it support? Will it even run on my computer? Gear VR, supported by Oculus' all-encompassing Oculus Home experience, eliminates these questions and many more. Yes, the Oculus Rift is explicitly a development kit. Oculus makes you check a box that says "I understand this hardware is intended for developers and it is not a consumer product," before you can buy the unit. I am not faulting the DK2 for the questions listed above. But damn if it isn't refreshing to have it all taken care of for you. Oculus wants to deliver the same ease-of-use on desktop, but it's making its debut on mobile. For all the talk of Gear VR being the "Innovator Edition," (like a hardware beta), or as Oculus outwardly assures, still a development kit, I'm very impressed by the polish of the entire Gear VR experience. Gear VR Experience What's it like to really use Gear VR? Well, let's start from the beginning. Oculus Home First you grab your Galaxy Note 4 (the only phone compatible with Gear VR), and slide it into the micro-USB plug. Then you press down on the other end of the phone to lock it firmly in place. Put Gear VR on your head and you'll be inside of Oculus Home. Navigation is handled through a combination of looking and swiping the touchpad on the right side of Gear VR. Occasionally there are times where this is inconsistent—you'll think you can look to select something but you actually have to swipe over to it first—but on the whole it works fairly well and it's something that will likely improve over time. The Home menu shows recently used applications. On the left there's a button to access the Store and a special section of the store for stuff from Samsung. On the right side is a button to access the Library, which consists of all of your installed VR apps. At the bottom of the view is three buttons to quickly navigate between those segments. When you look to select those bottom buttons, they actually rise up passed your cursor, requiring you to then look up to where they've moved, which is somewhat annoying. Perhaps for this reason, I found myself avoiding those bottom buttons and instead using other means of getting around. Store The Store will be familiar to anyone who's used an app store, which is probably every single person reading this right now. Apps are arranged in attractive groupings of six. You can use the touchpad to scroll between groups, and use your head to highlight items within groups, while tapping the touchpad will select an item. As of now, all apps are displayed this way in one big group. With 20 apps currently available, it's manageable. But it's clear that there will need to be more sorting and categorization in the future, lest you be stuck scrolling this way between hundreds of apps. That's something that will obviously come with time. While we're talking about the swipe scrolling on the touchpad—it works, but there's room for improvement. In most cases you are stuck with one swipe per scroll. So for instance, in the Store (see the screenshot above), one swipe will move that card in the background on the right into focus. But no matter how fast you swipe or how far, it'll only ever move one position. For long lists this can be tedious because you may need five swipes to get to where you want to go and your speed is limited as you must wait for the prior animation to finish before swiping again. I would advise Oculus to pay closer attention to Google Glass—I know Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus has one—which has already spent a decent amount of time figuring out how to navigate a similar interface with just a touchpad, and they've devised a number of useful gestures. In Glass, you can give the touchpad a quick swipe and it'll scroll through lots of items with momentum. That would be handy in Gear VR as well (it's actually present in at least one of the apps). For now it isn't a huge problem because most lists aren't that long, however, as the Store grows, the need for a quick way to get around will become clear. Installing Apps Each app has its own little page which shows a title, cover photo, rating, and buttons for Install/Start, Summary, Details, Media, and Updates. Pay attention to the Summary, as it will tell you if the game requires a Bluetooth gamepad (Samsung has one which they sell optionally with Gear VR). Most games don't require it, but it's good to before installing, in case you don't have one. [gallery type="square" ids="19067,19070,19068,19069,19071"] The entire installation experience is dead simple. Just look at the Install button and tap on the touchpad to select. The app starts downloading in the background and then you can go on your merry way. You'll get a pop-up alerting you that it's been installed. Oculus handles installations at a very low level, much like Android itself. In fact, if you start installing an app and then decide you're done with Gear VR and remove your Note 4 from it, you'll find that the app continues to install and you can check its progress via the Android notification menu—very seamless. To answer a question up front: you cannot run VR apps from the Google Play Store (made for Cardboard or otherwise) in Gear VR. You're restricted to what comes through the Oculus Store. That said, the initial batch of VR apps on Gear VR are varied and all very well made. And while Samsung definitely doesn't sanction it, there's a way to trick Gear VR into working with standard Android VR apps. More on that soon. See Also: With 500,000+ Units Shipped, Google Just Got Serious About Cardboard Games, Apps, and Experiences Oculus currently splits apps into three categories: Games, Apps, and Experiences. While it's easy to categorize most apps within these hoppers, there's always a chance to blur the lines, especially between Games and Experiences. For instance, theBlu is a real-time experience that runs in a game engine, but since it's only minimally interactive, it's found a home in the Experiences category. [gallery type="rectangular" ids="19080,19077,19078"] Right now, this categorization isn't actually present in Oculus Home itself, but the Oculus Android app, which allows you to browse the Store and manage your library in a non-VR interface, allows you to sort the Store in this way. It's likely that we'll see these categories make their way into the VR end of things to help the sorting challenge that I mentioned previously. Here's everything available through the Store at the time of writing: [one-third-first] Games Proton Pulse BombSquad VR Romans from Mars 360 Dreadhalls Andshar Wars Darknet Esper Ikarus Viral Minotaur Rescue VR Hero Bound First Steps [/one-third-first][one-third] Apps VR Gallery Oculus Cinema Oculus 360 Photos Oculus 360 Videos [/one-third][one-third] Experiences theBlueVR Titans of Space Cirque du Soleil's Zarkana VR Introduction Strangers with Patrick Watson [/one-third][clear-line] Games Games are the highly interactive and generally interaction-driven apps that you'll find on Gear VR. While there's a number of incredible classics that we've known from the Oculus Rift—Proton Pulse, Darknet, and Dreadhalls—I'm going to focus on some of the brand new apps that haven't been seen before. Romans from Mars This is an adaptation of an Android game of the same name by developer SideKick. In VR, it takes form as a first-person defense game where you control a ballista, a giant spear launcher, used to defend a palace from little martians dropped off by UFOs, naturally. Essentially what's been done here is Gear VR has transported you right into a game you'd expect to find on Android—a low-poly, cartoonish game—and it's awesome. Suddenly you've gone from this little handheld and touch experience to a game where you feel like you're actually standing inside that cartoonish world. The game is quite a bit of fun, but as with most currently on the Store, it's just a demo. Most developers plan to release full versions of their games once Oculus enables monetization in the Store, and that's expected in 2015. Still, from the demo you get a good feel for the mechanics. Your head is used to aim. Tapping on the touchpad or pressing the 1 button on the gamepad fires the ballista. You have to lead your targets because of the spear's travel time, and the lead increases based on the target's distance. The entire interface is in-world, no HUD, which is great. To the left you can see a banner which shows how many lives you have left. Below is a chest full of gold which you collect by killing enemies. Gold is used to upgrade your ballista's abilities through an upgrade menu that pops up in front of you between rounds. You can upgrade fire rate, crit chance, and damage radius. On the right of your ballista is a bottle of mana which fills as you kill enemies. Swiping down on the touchpad (or a corresponding button on the gamepad) shoots down a bolt of lightning to destroy lots of enemies at once. Behind you on the right is a lever which allows you to switch between manual and automatic fire. The game feels like quite a bit of fun and is plenty polished, but as it's a demo, it doesn't get challenging enough to know whether or not it will allow for strategy or simply chaos. There's no multiplayer option yet, but it would definitely be fun to play with another Gear VR user, or maybe even cross-play between the standard Android app and Gear VR players! Herobound Herobound, which some of you may be familiar with from its working title, VR Quest, is a Zelda-esque dungeon crawler that's built from the ground up with an inventive VR layout. This is a first-party app developed by Oculus, and the company has gone all out, creating rich and frequently beautiful environments. You play as a little sword-wielding goblin. You'll set out from your house to the overworld and find yourself before a massive volcano with smoke and fire billowing from its top. To your left is a fire-themed dungeon, and to your right, a water-themed dungeon. In front of you, at the base of the volcano, is a massive gate. A sign tells you that you need to recover an item from the fire and water dungeons before venturing into the volcano dungeon. Hmm... now where have I done something like this before? Herobound's gameplay is well trodden territory—but certainly still fun—though the game's achievement is its bar-setting visuals and comfort. Oculus has made very interesting use of this game's layout for VR comfort and mobile optimization. The game is played from a third-person perspective and your head is always in a static location—it never moves with the character. When you enter a dungeon your perspective is up high, looking down at your character and little creatures in a room that's completely in front of you. The rooms vary in size and you'll turn left and right as you track your character, but there's never the need to turn more than 180 degrees. As you move from one room to the next, your view fades to black and then a new room comes into view. The various rooms do a great job of making you feel like you're really inside of a place. You're watching this action unfold from a higher perspective, but you're very much there in the room with your character and the enemies. The rooms vary in design and some of them are really cool. You may find yourself looking up in a room within the water dungeon to find that the ceiling of the room has collapsed and beyond it lies a massive cavern. Some rooms are adorned with ancient statues that feel like they have a role to play in the game's (so far non-existent) story. Others have terrace hallways up above the action that beg you to wonder where they might go. The game requires a gamepad. The left stick controls your character's movement. The 1 button will swing your sword—three quick taps will initiate a little combo that does more damage on the final swing. One of the buttons makes the character roll, which is useful for dodging and getting away from groups of enemies. In dungeon-crawler fashion, there's gems to collect and (limited) loot to find. Things start out slow as you move from room to room, with varied but not terribly distinct enemies. The gameplay starts to mix up as you get deeper into the dungeons and especially as you find new equipment. One standout for me is several rooms in the fire dungeon that are completely dark, save for a few torches placed around the room and the one you're carrying. Ghosts haunt the darkness, and their mesmerizing red glowing eyes are the only thing you can see until you reveal the rest with your torch. It was pretty creepy the first time I encountered these enemies, seeing only their eyes, knowing that they were lurking in the darkness waiting to attack my character. The ability of the Note 4's screen to produce deep blacks is a huge benefit to these scenes. Later in the fire dungeon you'll find a better sword. It has a bit more reach and more damage, but the gameplay is fairly straightforward until you find the bow in the water dungeon. The bow is aimed by your looking position, and you'll find red targets scattered about the game, often up high, encouraging you to look around the spaces; hitting those targets unlock doors or secrets. This mechanic gives the game a new layer of depth. The water temple seemed to be home to more platforming sections and more varied enemies, including some water-dwelling creatures that fire ranged attacks, and a kraken-like tentacle that can only be dispatched with the bow. Herobound is a lot of fun and after an hour inside the game I still have more to play. I look forward to seeing what surprises await in the volcano dungeon. Ikarus Ikarus is another mostly third-person perspective game where you control a little figure down below. It's developed by Uber Entertainment. The game interestingly switches from third person to first person to perform specific actions, like operating a crane or pressing a button to ride an elevator. The game doesn't require the gamepad, instead you issue movement commands by looking where you want your character to go and tapping the touchpad. The character has a mind of its own and will find the shortest path to the point which you've directed them. The opening of the game has your character, a young woman, and her father crash landing a biplane on some sort of massive floating structure. A huge robot comes to take the woman away, but her father defends her and is taken instead. From there, she heads off on a rescue mission. In the demo you're running along small pathways with maintenance robots on patrol. You will have to direct your character to move at the right time so they don't spot you. You'll partake in a few simple puzzles on the quest to find her father. The demo is over pretty quickly and there's still work to do on helping players understand when to initiate certain actions (like getting out of an elevator), but being able to control a character in an environment like this with nothing but the touchpad is a very smart idea and one that we may see more commonly as more games are crafted for Gear VR. I'm looking forward to getting a bigger helping of Ikarus to see what other kinds of puzzles and action are in store. Continue Reading on Page 2... Apps All of the apps currently available feel to me like they could be combined into one overarching app to eliminate confusion. Right now there's four apps for viewing photos and videos. Two of them are for viewing non-VR content and two are for viewing VR content: VR Gallery: for viewing non-VR photos Oculus Cinema: for watching non-VR videos Oculus 360 Photos: for viewing VR photos Oculus 360 Videos: for viewing VR videos The cool thing about the first two is that you can easily see your own content in a VR space. Just connect your Gear VR to your computer and drop videos or photos into the appropriate folders. Oculus 360 Photos I'm going to start with Oculus 360 Photos because it absolutely blew me away. I did not expect 360 photos to be one of the killer pieces of content at Gear VR's launch, and I was dead wrong. Thanks to some spectacular photography by providers like 360cities, the 360 photos included in the app show off the Galaxy Note 4's 1440p display like nothing else in the entire arsenal of Gear VR content. I never expected I'd feel Presence (the VR research field’s term for psychological immersion) from a non-3D panoramic photo, but there was a brief moment when viewing an amazing scene of the Mars Curiosity rover that struck me as undeniably present. Here's the shot I was looking at, though seeing it on a flat screen does not do it justice: The resolution apparent in many of these panoramas is striking. The rover stands out in intricate detail, and the fineness of the Martian soil is instantly visible. That's probably thanks to the photo's native 30,000x15,000 resolution. Whenever VR videos hit this level of detail it will become frighteningly easy to virtually and convincingly transport yourself anywhere in the world. The 62 pre-loaded panoramic photos are impressive and their content varied. The photos are broken down into categories: Cities, Landscapes, Space, Underwater, and an 'Unusual' category, among others, which has a photo right at the entrance to a bee hive; you can see what appear to be massive bees all around you—it's really quite interesting. You can mark photos as favorites which puts them into their own category, great for saving those which you want to be able to quickly show others. Thanks to their incredible simplicity (just... look), I've showed 360 photos to pretty much anyone who has come my way. Each person seems to have a different category of photo that speaks to them (its definitely the Space category for me), but regardless of which, a wow is elicited from all. There's never been a better way to view panoramic photography. I could absolutely see this inspiring a generation of 360 photographers. Oculus 360 Videos Oculus 360 Videos allows you to play back spherical videos which can be 2D or 3D. Eight videos come pre-loaded. Some are live-action and some are pre-rendered CGI. All appeared to run at 60 FPS. [gallery type="square" ids="19132,19129"] The videos were hit or miss for me. Some, like 360 Tours Iceland, had breathtaking moments, like running alongside a herd of wild horses (the camera suspended from a low-flying helicopter), hearing their mass as they galloped at full speed along an open field. Others, like the Avengers VR experience seemed dull. You'll notice a range of the quality of footage, even between clips from the same experience. 360 videos in VR are still begging for more resolution from camera equipment and recording techniques. This will improve over time, and when it does, it's going to get way better. For a taste of what's to come, just look at the amazing stills that come with Oculus 360 Photos. See Also: First Impressions of Project Beyond, Samsung’s 360 3D Camera for VR Innerspace VR's Fifth Sleep and The Cave, pre-rendered 3D CGI scenes created in CryEngine, were interesting and quite beautiful at times. I still think better resolution in the footage itself would make the experience much better, but Innerspace's experimentation in immersive storytelling is something to be watched carefully. I'm really looking forward to more from these folks. And a shoutout to The Dive, an underwater live-action experience which, despite the uncomfortably swaying camera, had a cool moment at the end which is worth sticking around for (I won't ruin it here). Oculus Cinema Oculus Cinema lets you view non-VR 2D and 3D video content and it does a great job at that. There's four theaters to choose from: Home Theater, Cinema, Moon, and Void (which is just a black space). The detail that Oculus has managed to build into these theaters is amazing, and graphics that look this realistic are a very clear driver for immersion. I was blown away by how real the Home Theater looked the first time I put my head inside. If you look at your feet on the Moon, you'll see footprints in the dust that look photorealistic. Watching films inside is great, especially in Cinema which feels like it has a massive screen. The resolution is good enough that it feels like you could really watch videos in here to enjoy them, not just for the novelty of watching in VR. [gallery type="rectangular" ids="19110,19109,19111"] The screenshots above are not concepts, those are the real graphics of the experience as you're sitting in it. It would appear that Oculus has used a number of imaging tricks to bring this level of detail into these spaces. I'm fairly certain it's the fact that you don't move within the theater (you're always in the same chair) that allows them to lavish every surface with such detail while maintaining performance. Pre-baked lightning, for instance, means they can save big on resources while still providing highly realistic lightning, which is one of the most important things for realism in graphics. If you can't move, they can also strip away all unseen surfaces to save on polygon counts. VR Gallery VR Gallery lets you view 2D photos in a VR space. Confusingly, you can also watch videos through it, but that seems oddly redundant given Oculus Cinema (another reason I think the four apps currently available should be collapsed into one). VR Gallery's functionality doesn't seem that compelling to me, but like Oculus Cinema, it's nice to be able to easily bring your own content into a VR space. If you want to immerse someone in a slideshow of your vacation to Paris, you certainly can. [gallery columns="4" ids="19118,19117,19116,19115"] Inside the app, the interface is pretty bare bones. You'll see a list of folders presented in a grid, which you can drill down into to select individual photos or videos. You can zoom by swiping up on the touchpad, and this can also be used to pan, if you zoom in and out as you put the cursor over different parts of the photo. Experiences Experiences can be live-action or CGI, but they are generally less interactive than what Oculus puts into the Games category. At Gear VR launch, there's five available. The always-wonderful Titans of Space makes an appearance, but I shouldn't need to tell you once again that it's worth seeing (it's got some nice upgrades and the planetary imagery looks better than ever with the Note 4's 1440p display). I'll focus instead on some new experiences. Strangers with Patrick Watson This is a live-action 3D video recording of a candid moment in the studio of musician Patrick Watson. It was produced by Felix & Paul Studios, and it's one of my favorite experiences on Gear VR. It's actually been around for a little while, but hasn't made its public VR debut until Gear VR. You're inside Watson's studio. Through the open windows you can hear the sound of a busy street. Watson is at his piano, around him you can see a fantastic mess of instruments, recording equipment, and much more. The 3D and 360 recording imbues the place with a distinct character, as you feel very present in the room. Watson begins meandering on the piano as he starts into a song with some accompanying instruments played through a computer. He stops mid-intro to make some adjustments, addressing both his big black dog laying behind you. He begins again, launching into a superbly beautiful piece that will make you appreciate his unaided skill in both vocals and the piano. The video quality is pretty good, but it's the audio quality—and Watson's beautiful song, Strangers—that really shines. The sound is captured in 360 degrees, and you can hear the recorded instruments coming from the speakers flanking Watson's desk. If you turn around to look at the rest of the space, the audio will clearly be coming from behind you. I appreciate that the surround effect is not overdone. With some 3D audio demos, the veritable nobs are turned up to 11 to really sell the effect. In this experience it is properly subtle. By the end of the engrossing song, you've all but forgotten about the noisy street outside which fades back in, returning you from a world of musical immersion. The immersive performance won the 2014 Proto Award for Best Live Action Experience. See Also: ‘Hello, Again’ by Director Chris Milk is a Revolutionary Virtual Reality Concert Experience Featuring Beck I've returned to Strangers with Patrick Watson time and again. Even now as I write this, I'd like to jump in there and not just watch Watson play, but feel like he's playing for me, sitting right there next to him. In fact, I think I will. I'm back—that's not even the kind of music I usually listen to. theBlu theBlu is an in-engine ocean experience. You are toured underwater in a somewhat cartoonish, but ultimately well art-directed, underwater environment. With a theme of nature-appreciation, a narrator tells you about the various sea creatures that swim by: whales, stingrays, sharks, etc. The underwater environments feel sparse, but the little tours are entertaining enough. There's about 10 minutes worth of experience currently, and it looks like more are due to be added. It's clear that developer WemoLab has spent time learning how to effectively direct the attention of the player; as you follow one creature off into the depths, others often enter the scene from the same area. What takes me a bit out of the experience are the not-so-realistic animations. They're not bad—animating sea-creatures realistically is something you could spend a lifetime mastering—but creatures in theBlu sometimes feel like they're being pulled around like marionettes rather than moving themselves through liquid. I'm looking forward to seeing how this compares the forthcoming Ocean Rift, whose developer, Llyr ap Cenydd, has been working on a procedural animation system that looks mighty impressive. Continue Reading on Page 3... Other Stuff Universal Menu The universal menu can be launched at any point by holding the Back button above the trackpad. This brings up a menu with a row of buttons across the bottom: Oculus Home, Passthrough Camera, Reorient, Do Not Disturb, Brightness, and Comfort Mode. The Oculus Home button takes you back to Oculus Home, naturally. Passthrough Camera turns on the Note 4's camera, allowing you to see through to the outside world. Reorient redefines your forward-direction, though oddly enough the button is offset from center. Oculus might take into account exactly how far offset that button is, and factor it into the reorientation, but it would seem more intuitive to have the reorient button directly in the center of your view. Do Not Disturb can be toggled on and off, suppressing calls and notifications. Brightness has a slider to control the screen brightness using the trackpad, though I've never felt the need to make an adjustment. Comfort Mode makes the screen give off warmer colors, sort of like f.lux, though again I've never felt the need to use it. Passthrough Camera The Passthrough Camera button activates the camera on the Note 4 and projects its view of the real world into the virtual space. The projected view is set correctly to the camera's field of view, which gives it the appearance of being a little window into the real world. It's kind of weird, given that it's much more limited in field of view than your actual eyes, and it lacks 3D so you have no sense of depth, but it's very useful and I think people will absolutely want something like this on the Oculus Rift consumer version (CV1). The Passthrough Camera makes it particularly easy to grab a controller, put on headphones, interact with people, or even eat sushi, all without taking the headset off. I only wish there was a faster way to enable it, maybe a double-tap and hold on the back button? I could definitely see VR enthusiasts asking Samsung to include a wider field of view and 3D camera on the Note 5 to make the passthrough camera even more useful. Notifications I had figured that the easy way for Oculus to handle notifications would be to simply suppress them completely. To my surprise, they've tapped into Android's notification system and present them right inside VR as they come. For the most part it's read-only; there's currently no way to see more than the message type (email/text) and a tiny preview. But at least you won't miss that crucial email while immersed in VR (unless you want to shut out all signs of the real world by enabling Do Not Disturb). [gallery type="square" ids="19144,19143"] Even phone calls are represented in VR. You'll see a green phone icon appear to the top left of the forward position. Looking at it will expand to show the caller, phone number, and a contact photo. Sadly, calls can't be answered in VR, but you can dismiss them by looking at the red icon and tapping on the touchpad. See Also: Samsung Gear VR Detailed Review: Part One – Design Comparison to Oculus Rift DK2 Between Part One and Part Two, we're now up to 7500 words on Gear VR—and there's still more to say. Stay tuned for Part Three, where we'll dig into the performance of Gear VR with items like battery life, heat, and head tracking. Questions? Drop us a line below.