14 May 2023
Showed Horizon VR to my wife Rachel’s family, and some of them tried it out too. Noticed a few things:
- I was quickly more comfortable with putting on the headset and adjusting it and going right back into VR, more so than the first time (i.e. the setup/prep time is dropping quickly) and much more so than Rachel and her sister since it was their first time (they had the same “really have to get used to this big headset” and tuning it to their eyes and so forth); both liked the painting quite a lot. This seems to mean that the intense setup/onboarding experience is temporary, at least for some people.
- I thought the painting was really cool (never tried that before); there was a paintbrush with 5 paint colors that you could dip into, and then paint on a wall (cave art style)
- I also “fought” a real machine and did pretty well with the bow and arrow (tho had to shoot the thing literally like 100x); this was my first action sequence in VR and it performed very naturally.
- Rachel took up the game pretty quickly, she was pretty calm and it felt pretty natural to her; no concerns or breakouts
- Her sister was quite hesitant to try it out, since one of the things she saw me do was fight a machine (though we reassured it she didn’t have to do that). She started out in the no-walk “menu” of Horizon VR where all you can do is look around; she then was willing to going into the real level and did the painting that Rachel did; was generally quite curious
- Other family members did not want to try the VR; one seemed downright bored with it; another had tons of questions that stretched my XR knowledge.
