Virtual Dreams V: Inner Space

I find it oddly relaxing to spend time in the Mission: ISS virtual reality program, just floating around the International Space Station - I wonder if Chris Hadfield ever does this just for old time's sake?

- Sid

Virtual Dreams IV: IRL VR.

 

If you own an Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset, buy the Elite Head Strap upgrade.  Now.  

Right now. 

Are you still reading this? NOW.

No, seriously, the Oculus Elite head strap upgrade was worth every cent of the sixty-seven dollars that it costs on Amazon™.  It was a bit disconcerting to install - it's easy to imagine breaking a little plastic clip by accident and rendering the whole thing useless - but once in place, it's a huge improvement over the stock strap in terms of comfort and, more importantly, stability.  The elastic strap that shipped with the headset never really did a great job, but the ratcheted hard plastic Elite strap provides a much better fit and a better seal around the eyepiece to prevent light leaks, without being uncomfortable.  

For committed players, there's also a version with a secondary battery to extend usage time, but if you're that committed, you should probably look at catheter pricing as well, just in case.

- Sid

 

Virtual Dreams III: Thanks anyway.

The Oculus Quest 2 operating system allows users to select from several virtual environments that acts as a backdrop for the headset's operating system and menu screens - not surprisingly, I've chosen the space station setting.

To my amusement, I recently learned that it’s possible to walk around in this virtual environment and explore the different rooms - provided that you do it in the middle of an empty football field or something similar, there doesn't seem to be any way to teleport from place to place.  My congratulations to Oculus on creating an explorable virtual environment that virtually no one can explore. 

- Sid

 

Virtual Dreams II: Living the Dream

My Oculus Quest 2 VR headset arrived today, and, as my wife would say, I kind of love it.

It's not perfect - I'm still fiddling with the Interpupilary Distance Settings on the eyepieces, I've been spoiled by 5K resolution on my iMac, and motion sickness is more of an immediate issue than I thought it would be, but for the most part, it does everything that I wanted - and expected - it to do beautifully.   

The packaging has the sort of clean molded look that Apple uses, and it's unexpected solid, which turns out to have a practical application in this case: after all, you have to keep the headset and controllers somewhere when they're not in use.  Oculus recommends that you charge the headset before your first use, but once you're charged and ready to go, setup is simple - the unit started up with no problems, the controllers paired up easily,  and I was able to seamlessly connect to our wireless router. 

There's one setup feature that reviewers cite as a possible deal breaker for the Quest 2:  you need to have a Facebook™ account.  I haven't used Facebook on a social basis for perhaps a decade, but I had to create a placeholder account at work to access our corporate page, so I was fine.  Users with more active accounts may want to adjust the privacy settings once they have the headset running.

The unit has a number of features intended to minimize the environmental hazards of VR, such as mapping your surroundings on the headset’s external cameras so that you don't break your favourite lamp - or your 60 inch TV set - while engaged in furious virtual lightsaber combat, and a highly useful option where double-tapping on the headset frame switches your view to the external camera sensors, which allows you to re-orient yourself in your space - not to mention find your controllers when starting up.

The gaming library isn’t huge, but it’s surprisingly affordable. PC games generally weigh in at $50-60 and up, whereas the Oculus games seem to uniformly fall into the $20-30 CAD range. There are also some free downloads and demos, which happily includes the ISS experience that captured my imagination in New York, and the Space Pirate Trainer demo, a short introduction to a simple futuristic two-gun arcade shooter that was unexpectedly fun, and went right onto the shopping list. 

Along with the full version of Space Pirate Trainer, the store features a Walking Dead first person shooter/survival game set in New Orleans, the well-reviewed Red Matter puzzle solving game, and Star Wars games such as a three-part Darth Vader series, Vader Immortal, and Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, a semi-open world game set in the world of Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World and Disneyland. I chose Tales from the Galaxy's Edge as my inaugural purchase, and the process was simple and the download wait was negligible. 

Tales wisely doesn't attempt to provide photorealistic resolution, but the 3D illusion is astonishing, especially in the views from the orbiting cargo hauler.  The controllers show as gauntlets equipped with different control options, and when you look down, you discover that you're wearing an vest/tool belt combination, with holsters and loops for tools, weapons and drones, along with a storage pouch.  I'm amused to discover that the bar which acts as a sort of home base on Batuu overlooks the central plaza in Black Spire Outpost. (Been there, done that, and I have the T-shirt - actually, two t-shirts, come to think of it.)

In the interests of fair franchise representation, there’s also a Star Trek Bridge Crew game, but it doesn’t seem to have the same range of play and action as the Star Wars games.  On the other hand, given that motion sickness due to perceived movement is something of an issue, maybe buying a game where you sit still in a nice chair on the bridge of the USS Enterprise is a smarter idea than I think it is.

- Sid

 

* The original sold for $399 USD, so that Canadian price is an estimate.  The current price is surprisingly reasonable, given that high end models like the Valve Index top out at almost two grand.

 

Virtual Dreams I: Quest

I'm pleased to announce that I've recently received a promotion at work.  Sadly, as is so often the case, my new responsibilities were added onto my old ones rather than replacing them, but at least it came with a notable raise. I generally find it hard to spend money on myself, but I decided that in this case, it was probably acceptable to reward myself for getting ahead.

But what to buy?

I looked at Star Wars Rebellion and Resistance fighter pilot helmets, I looked at Major Matt Mason crawlers on eBay, I looked at original comic book art on the Heritage Auctions web site,  I looked at Alienware gaming systems, but nothing really rang the bell in terms of both price point and geek appeal. 

Finally, after much thought, and much research, I decided that a virtual reality headset would be the ideal SF/geek gift to celebrate my new job description (and paycheque): the culmination of a long-standing interest in virtual reality experiences.

My first experience with VR was in 1994, at a SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group Graphics) conference in Florida. There were lineups for the two VR demos that were running on the show floor. One was a basic VR port of the original Doom, in all its pixelated 8-bit glory. The other was a simplified version of the speeder bike from The Return of the Jedi, which featured a recumbent bike like the ones in the movie, and a VR landscape populated with simple geometric shapes. Unlike the POV Doom demo, the speeder bike program was a full VR environment, where the headmount allowed a fully tracked 360 view as the bike flashed through the landscape. 

I was fascinated by both of the demos, but sadly neither one was intended for any kind of commercial release, they were just experimental proof-of-concept experiences.

Over the years since then, I’ve had a variety of VR and near-VR experiences – near-VR being defined as things like the Dome-G video presentation at Gundam Front in Tokyo, the Smuggler’s Run ride at Galaxy’s Edge in Disneyland, or flyover rides like the ones in Vancouver and Disneyland’s California Adventure. 

My most recent full-VR experience was the Mission ISS VR program in 2019, featured at the Intrepid Space Shuttle Pavilion on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. I loved that brief VR session on - and outside - the International Space Station, to the point where I actually did some research on VR headsets at the time, but finally decided that the cost of a compatible headset and a suitably powerful graphics card was prohibitive.

I may not have done enough research, or, in retrospect, I may have just made the right decision by not buying at that point in time. The Oculus Quest 2 headset that I’ve just ordered from Amazon is the successor to the original Quest, which was released in May of 2019 and would have been available when I was originally looking around.

That first model received mixed reviews, but the Quest 2, which only recently entered the marketplace in October of 2020, seems to be universally viewed as having solved the problems of the original version, reducing weight and increasing the resolution, while managing to bring down its original price point of over $500 CAD to a modest $399.

The upgraded Quest 2 is a stand-alone VR headset, with onboard storage for your game library and the option of using a USB link cable for access to PC games. It comes in 64 GB and 128 GB onboard storage options, but critics agree that the less expensive 64 GB model that I’ve purchased is more than adequate. The headset links with a pair of controllers that act as pointers, hands, guns, and tools in virtual space.

And, a strong vote for the Quest 2, it will run the ISS VR program that I enjoyed in New York, which is available as a free download.

Now that I've placed my order with Amazon, I'm sure that I've made a good choice. After all, VR seems like such an obvious option in the pandemic lockdown environment – what better time to be able to soar in space?

- Sid

 

* I’m also not sure that the original Quest would have run the ISS program, another indicator that a deferred purchase was a prudent decision.

Ready Player One: Easter Eggs.

Use the key, unlock the door
See what your fate might have in store
Come explore your dreams' creation
Enter this world of imagination

Rush, Twilight Zone, 2112

I've just finished an enjoyable re-read of Ready Player One, Ernest Cline's epic 2011 homage to 80s pop and geek culture.  I was thinking about seeing the Steven Spielberg movie version, but my somewhat disappointed co-worker Christi reported that it was a long way from the book, so I thought that I'd refresh my memory of the story before making a final decision.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it tells the tale of a near-future world on the brink of collapse, where most of the world's population spends its time in the OASIS, an immersive virtual reality that has replaced the internet.  James Halliday, the inventor of the OASIS,  has recently died, leaving behind a complex puzzle in place of a will.  Whoever solves the puzzle will win control of both his incredible fortune and the OASIS, effectively making them the most powerful person on the planet.

Wade Watts, the 18-year-old protagonist, spends all his spare time attempting to solve the riddle left behind by Halliday.  Halliday never abandoned his fascination with the geek lifestyle of his youth in the 1980s, and as such Wade has become an obsessed expert in both Halliday's life and the 80s, especially the nascent computer and arcade gaming culture of the period.

Ultimately, the book is a tribute to (and justification for) that sort of obsession, making it a pathway to being the richest person in the world rather than the dead end that it is often is in real life.  It's one thing to memorize all the dialogue from War Games in order to become a billionaire, but perhaps a bit sad if you're doing it because you have nothing else in your life.

Surprisingly, the book won an award from the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services division in 2012, which puzzles me more than a little, given the book's fanatical reliance on 80s geek trivia - I would expect that in spite of its frequent explanations, most of the book would be gibberish to a young adult reader, although I admit that the novel does teach larger lessons about life.

 

I'm also puzzled as to how anyone who wasn't around in the 80s could appreciate most of this book in the first place - in fact, just being around in the 80s probably isn't enough to make the grade. I'm a science fiction-fantasy-computer game geek who turned 19 in 1980, and, as such, I'm right in the zone for Ready Player One. I know what a Trash-80 is, I played Zork* and Joust on my 8-bit Atari 800XL (which I still have in storage**), I know who Gygax Sector is named after, I smiled when I read that the password for the hero's teleportation ring is Brundell, I still have an MP3 version of Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party in my iTunes library, and on and on and on.  I can't claim to recognize every single reference, but I strongly suspect that I score higher than a lot of people in my generation, not to mention anyone born after 1990.

As a result, I would expect the movie to abandon a lot of the dense deep-dive geek content that fuels the book, purely out of self-defense.  Based on the trailers, the movie relies more heavily on visual cues from a wider range of pop culture, which would certainly makes it a lot more accessible to the average viewer.  People are far more likely to recognize iconic images like the Iron Giant than they are to pick up on the arcana of 1980s Japanese giant robot anime, for example.  Even so, I suspect that there's a lot of obscure references to modern geek culture buried in the script, which should satisfy my desire for otaku superiority.

I had almost decided to pass on the big screen version of Ready Player One, but after finishing the book I decided to give the movie a chance.  I'm coming in quite late in the film's run, but fortunately it's still showing in 3D at theatres in Vancouver, and I'm off to a showing this evening.

I was originally going to attend on my own, but Karli's plans for the evening were cancelled at the last minute, and she's agreed to join me, thereby providing a useful non-geek control group for recognition of Easter Eggs. Oh well - my level of obscure geek knowledge may not make the richest person on the planet, but at least I'll be able to use it to impress my girlfriend - a term that hardly ever ends up in the same sentence as "obscure geek knowledge".

- Sid

* To tell the truth, I never liked the interactive text games like Zork, I was much more of an arcade-style gamer.  And I never did manage to get the damn Babel fish into my ear.

** And which actually still works, although it took a few minutes for it to warm up the last time I hooked up all the bits and pieces.

P.S.  There are two Easter Egg references in this posting, let me know if you find both of them.

Attack of the Monoboob.

I come from the Net, through systems, peoples and cities, to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian - to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams - to defend them from their enemies.

They say the User lives outside the Net, and inputs games for pleasure.  No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out! 

REBOOT!

It would appear that summer has arrived on the West Coast, and as such, sunshine has once again become a familiar sight. As a result, I'm starting to walk downtown on Saturdays for lunch and some shopping.

Sadly, HMV has closed the doors on its flagship store on Burrard Street, so I've been forced to switch my DVD and Blu-ray shopping over to FutureShop on Granville.  This week I was pleased to see the collected Reboot! on the shelf for a mere fifteen dollars per two-season set, and without hesitation picked up the entire run.

Created by Vancouver's Mainframe Studios, ReBoot's 1994 debut on ABC made it the first fully digital commercial cartoon, preceding Toy Story by a full year.  (And, I might add, with six and a half hours of material rather than Toy Story's 81 minutes.)  For readers unfamiliar with the series, Reboot was built around the concept of computers as urban centers, virtual cities if you will, inhabited by binomes - the various bits and bytes that made up the operating system. The hero of the show was Bob, a Guardian tasked with defending a system called Mainframe from the various perils of game downloads (which, when won by the User, caused massive damage to the system) and viruses such as the evil Megabyte and his sorcerous sister, Hexadecimal.

Intended as children's programming, it was also loaded with geek references and computer jokes, ranging from the obvious, such as Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Bob's love interest Dot Matrix, to the more obscure - did everyone realize that Enzo the boyish sprite was named after the initials of microprocessor flag bits? (Enable interrupt, Negative, Zero and Overflow.) Or Phong, the Command.com/mayor of Mainframe, who was named after a shading algorithm used in rendering 3-D files.*

The producers of ReBoot were surprised to find themselves in almost constant conflict with ABC, who demanded that Dot's bosom be less anatomically correct (ergo the infamous monoboob of the title), refused to let her kiss her brother on his birthday due to the sexual connotations (no, honestly), and, adding insult to injury, told the Canadian company that they had to remove a reference to hockey.

The end of the second season saw a parting of the ways with ABC, and a move to syndication. (And, as you'd expect, a more realistic bosom for Dot.)  It also saw improved animation and rendering, and an extended, more mature story arc dealing with Enzo's search through the Web for Bob, who was banished from Mainframe by Megabyte at the end of Season Two.  Season Three saw the end of the series as such, but there were two follow-up feature-length films that were broadcast in North America as a truncated fourth season.

It's great to watch the show again, and very gratifying to once again see the astonishing amount of creativity and attention to detail that made it so enjoyable for adults as well as children.  Ironically, the DVD episodes don't appear to be digitally rendered files, or if they are, they weren't rendered at DVD resolution.  My guess would be that they were either upsampled from lower resolution files, or perhaps transferred from some sort of digital video format.  

I wonder if the original pre-render files are still in existence?  Funny to think of them slowly eroding away bit by literal bit in some abandoned hard drive array or on backup tapes in a closet somewhere - in fact, that's actually very close to the final fate of Mainframe.  Sadly, if that has happened, it won't be possible to save those files as easily as Mainframe was saved in the series.

And how was Mainframe saved?  How else - by a reboot.

- Sid

*I've heard various theories regarding the provenance of Bob's rather prosaic name.  Wikipedia says that it's "likely" a reference to Amiga computer Blitter OBjects, but I've always fondly hoped that it came from Marathon, Bungie's 1994 Macintosh breakthough game.  There were cannon fodder characters in Marathon called BOB - Born On Board.  I guess it depends on whether the Mainframe team were Amiga fans or Apple believers.