The DeanBeat: The promise and the peril of virtual reality

I’ve been checking out a Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition virtual reality headset. And it’s been a fun experiment. The mobile virtual reality headset tells me a lot about the promise of VR, and the challenges that lie before it. Next week, at the Game Developers Conference, we’ll see a second generation of modern virtual reality experiences. I’m sure they’re going to be novel and cool, but they may still fall short of our dreams for some time to come.

My own home experiment has led me to this conclusion. Without telling her what it was, I had my 11-year-old try it out. I strapped the headset and tightened it as much as I could. It was too big for her. I snapped in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone into it. I started an app called Orbulus, which lets you stand in the middle of a 360-degree panoramic image. She used her eyes to zoom in on an image in the midst of the Great Wall of China.