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.

"Take me out to the ball game..."

As I've established in previous postings, every now and then I have a mild attack of math when I'm watching a movie or reading a book, and end up either going down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, depending on your preference for Alice novels. Most recently, this happened when I watched the first sneak peak from the upcoming Invincible animated series, scheduled for a March 26th debut on Amazon Prime™ Video.

The clip shows a pair of enhanced beings, father and son, hovering in midair as they throw a baseball back and forth while discussing the challenges of being a superhero.  Because they're superheroes, they're doing it the hard way:  they're throwing the ball AWAY from the other person so that it circumnavigates the planet before being caught.

It's a charming bonding moment, but there's so much extreme physics involved that I couldn't help myself from taking a closer look at what was actually going on.

It takes the baseball approximately 18 seconds to reach the son's glove after the father throws it. (I timed it at 17.98, but let's keep the math simple.)  Given that the Earth's circumference is 40,075 kilometers, distance divided by time gives the baseball a speed of 2226.389 km/s, or 8,014,999 km/hr. (speed per second x60 x60.)  The escape velocity for Earth is a piddly 11.2 km/s, so that baseball is GONE, headed in a straight line for distant horizons: the Moon, Saturn, Alpha Centauri, whatever the first solid object that gets in the way happens to be*.

But, hey, Dad is a superhero, maybe he can put a LOT of spin on the ball or something like that, so we'll generously assume that the baseball doesn't leave the planet.  Regardless, the ball is travelling at 6,542 times the speed of sound, so when Dad asks his son if he hears the ball coming, the son's answer of yes seems impossible, the ball is well out in front of any noise it might be making**.  Superhearing is all well and good, but the sound just can't have arrived yet.

But, once again, superheroes: in the interest of fairness, I freely confess that there may be aspects of superhearing that make this possible, although Clark Kent hasn't answered any of my texts on the topic.

However, at that sort of speed, the adiabatic compression of air in front of the ball is going to severely raise its temperature.  (If you thought that it was the friction of air that caused heating under these circumstances, welcome to the club, it took me a lot of misdirected searching on Google™ to realize my mistake.)  At this point, the math gets complicated, but we can take a lateral approach. 

Spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere are travelling at approximately 25 times the speed of sound (the compression effect doesn't really kick in until you're over the speed of sound, just as a side note for the interested student).  This produces temperatures of about 1480 degrees C.  The baseball has a much smaller surface area, but it's also travelling at 262 times that speed, and since leather starts to burn at 212 degrees C., it's unlikely that it survives very long on its trip around the world.

Not only that, but that's gotta be a pretty sturdy baseball glove, too.  And there's your homework, class: how much energy is released by a baseball travelling at 6,432 times the speed of sound when it hits a solid object? Just to get things started, a standard Major League baseball must weight between 5 and 5 1⁄4 ounces, or 142 and 149 grams.  And, as always, please show your work.

- Sid

 

* Less dramatic if it hits a bird, although I suppose it would be very dramatic from the bird's perspective, albeit for an extremely short period of time.

** Such as a really epic sonic boom, perhaps.