360-degree virtual reality headset will blow your mind

IF YOU haven’t tried 360-degree virtual reality, then you must — it will blow your mind.

IF you haven’t tried 360-degree virtual reality, then you must — it will blow your mind.

When you don a VR headset, you are no longer of this world. Instead, you look ahead, up, down, left, right and behind you in a virtual world, watching specially prepared 360-degree video and stills that engulf the senses completely. The brain is tricked into thinking you are of another place and time. It is the 1999 movie The Matrix come true.

Last week, I tried what is the best 360 VR viewer to date, Samsung’s Galaxy VR. It is a venture between Samsung and the now Facebook-owned Oculus VR. Virtual reality is a pet project of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg but the firm’s stand-alone product, the Oculus Rift, is yet to go to market.

Samsung isn’t the first to create an immersive VR viewer. Google produced Cardboard, a viewer with two lenses that you can build yourself or buy for about $10.

Content is king and the Gear VR offers alluring morsels to rope us in, some in 3D. In the two-minute introductory movie by Montreal outfit Felix & Paul Studios, I was on the summit of Haleakala, a volcano in Hawaii, sitting down in a yurt with a Mongolian family eating a meal, and on stage watching a short segment of Zarkana by Cirque de Soleil.

Another very effective video by the same outfit had me sitting in a studio apartment with Canadian singer Patrick Watson as he performed his song Strangers. I got to look around and felt I was there.

I also sideloaded a VR clip by Sydney firm Rapid VR, which ­featured champion snowboarder Torah Bright flying downhill, and clips of surfing, cycling and ­concerts. Sideloading means adding a clip directly to an SD card rather than loading it through the official store app. I did this to ­extend the content I could view.

I also sideloaded a VR film produced for the United Nations called Clouds over Sidra, which shows the life of a young Syrian woman. She offers a tour of her refugee camp in Jordan. It is stunning realism.

I concluded that the most ­realistic VR clips are relatively still scenes, where you take time to look around: the Patrick Watson studio, the yurt in Mongolia, Clouds over Sidra and the 360-­degree stills.

Viewing 360-degree VR scenes from the Mars rover, and city panoramas around the world was breathtaking, but with stills there was occasional shimmering as I moved around. The gentle-­moving helicopter journey over Iceland also was memorable.

The Gear VR is driven by a smartphone that you attach at the front of the device. The phone ­display projects images which the Gear VR lenses convert to a ­virtual reality experience.

The rub is that it works only with one smartphone, the Galaxy Note 4 — which costs more than $900. So you’d be right to say the Gear VR is a clever marketing pitch for selling more Note 4s. But that didn’t stop me liking VR ­immensely.

The Gear VR doesn’t have a battery because the phone does all the work. It executes the code that drives the VR, and its menu system. You install the Oculus app on the phone. The VR movies and images are stored on the phone’s micro SD card. Samsung gives you one preloaded with content.

The viewer has a touchpad for selecting video and images, a back button, and a volume rocker. When you don the VR, you’re taken to a home menu where you can select content from your ­library, or browse the Oculus store for more.

You can change media without removing the headset. You line up a small cross you see in your vision, “touch” the touchpad to choose an item, and swipe it to move between menus.

Samsung includes a tutorial that shows you how. There’s also a small spindle at the top for ­focusing.

The controls worked well but sometimes a swipe was interpreted as a tap and the Gear VR would fire up movies you didn’t want to see. It’s something Samsung can work on.

The one real downside is video resolution. The Note 4 has a stunningly high-resolution QHD display, but when you stretch and magnify its output to 360 degrees, it isn’t sharp. It tempers the ­realism.

The Oculus store has good ­offerings although they are scant at this time. Apart from those I’ve mentioned there are games, a clip from a Paul McCartney concert (Live and Let Die), and one featuring a spectacular flyover of New York and other locations.

There are amazing clips that show what’s possible with VR. One is Titans of Space, a guided tour of planets, moons and stars.

True, it’s available on other platforms but it does show the ­educational potential of the Gear VR. That’s true in an industry with companies such as AGL Energy seeking to use it for staff training.

There’s Californian firm Matterport’s amazing 3D visualisations made from linked series of stills. You can walk around a shop in San Francisco and inspect the knapsacks on display, and peruse the paintings in an art gallery.

You move around by locking your eyes on small blue circles in the distance.

The software moves you to that location where you look around again. This opens the prospect of VR online shopping.

One day, you’ll don a VR headset and go shopping around the aisles at Woolworths or Coles — a more interesting form of online ­shopping. You could inspect homes for sale in much the same way.

There’s a fun feature called ­Oculus Cinema, where you are ­totally immersed in a real cinema or home theatre setting with a full-sized screen, watching movies that you’ve uploaded to the Gear VR.

One can see other applications. Rapid VR, for example, says it is ­already capable of streaming live vision to the Gear VR.

That means you’ll don a VR headset for an ­up-close take of sporting events or be realistically at a meeting in a ­remote location.

I can imagine a patient in hospital using a Gear VR to talk live with their family who are elsewhere. They could be virtually in the room at the dinner table.

With the coming spate of 360 degree VR cameras, we’ll soon see people attach them to drones to create their own spectacular VR flyovers.

French tech firm Parrot says users soon will don an Oculus Rift headset to fly the new Bebop drone, experiencing it as if they were sitting in the drone’s cockpit. Applications are limitless.

The cameras that take 360 VR vision are basically spherical structures of many cameras pointing outward.

Software weaves the separate camera output into a contiguous stream.

Professional VR filmmakers spend a fortune on camera equipment, but consumer versions of 360 VR cameras are being developed. Samsung’s Project Beyond is one to watch here.

There will soon be more content. Samsung is yet to launch its Milk VR music clip service here, while YouTube is seeking to get into the action.

It’s early days, the technology has rough edges, but Gear VR shows the possibilities ahead for virtual reality. It is worth the ­experience.

Price: $249 + Galaxy Note 4 smartphone
Rating: 9/10

Features
Optical headset powered by attached phone
Control with touchpad, volume rocker, back button
360-degree immersive virtual reality
Oculus Store, Samsung Milk VR, 3rd party content

Pros
Stunning 360-degree virtual reality
Excellent onscreen navigation
Great introductory VR content

Cons
Mediocre video resolution
Swipes and clicks can get confused
Usable only with one phone (Galaxy Note 4)