Project 3 - School's Out

What Can you do?

REFLECTION

In project 2, we had a life-size virtual playset that can be placed into a real world, but you can always feel something is off because the style of the virtual playset is conflicting with the style of the real world which makes it hard to immerse ourselves into the playset. With the VR application we now have in project 3, everything is in a synthetic world with the same style which makes it super immersive since we can feel that we are in the same world as everything else in the environment. This is the power of virtual reality where it allows you to experience the virtual world like you are one of them.

I have a virtual reality headset myself, so I was able to experience the project the way it was meant to be experienced. I also tried using the simulator when I was debugging, and it is a completely different experience when using an actual VR headset. The fact that you could touch, grab, and interact with all the objects in the scene just feel much better than looking at a virtual scene on your phone where you can not interact with. I was able to pick up pretty much everything in the virtual reality scene and make them interact with other objects in the scene, it gives me the feel that the things I am doing actually impacts the virtual world which makes it much more fun and immersive.

The fact that you can only see the virtual environment makes the experience much more immersive as well. In project 2, the models I had clearly shows that the playset does not belong to the real world, and the fact that I could only look at the playset through my phone quickly breaks the immersion for me. I think this is a general problem for every augmented reality application since it is really hard to get models to look photo realistic and there are basically no feedback and interaction. However, as of now, virtual reality is a much more mature technology than augmented reality which gives developers much more power in creating an immersive experience.

For example, there are numerous products to help improve the immersion for virtual reality such as the haptic suit and glove which allows you to feel everything that is happening in the virtual world. This kind of products helps increase the immersion of VR experience to a whole new level which is something that augmented reality cannot achieve at this point in time. Another problem with augmented reality is that it is not easy to make the object interactable which is an important thing to have in order to make the world feels real. Unlike in virtual reality it is an easy thing to achieve and the fact that everything including the user is in a purely virtual world make it much easier to create a better experience.