p1x3l

I've talked about VR here right after I had my amazing first experience with the Vive. Since then I've tried the different VR platforms many times and in different settings. HTC Vive is still the best experience I've had (especialy compared to the Oculus Rift) but I haven't been able to get one myself. It's too pricey and I do not own a gaming desktop PC. The best way to play the Vive has been to travel to "cheap" countries and find Virtual Reality playshops where you can play for hours in exchange for a bit of money. There is no doubt that these are going to be the cybercafes of the future.

I've also tried playstation VR, which was pretty disapointing as a competitor to the Vive and the Rift. At some point I got a Google cardboard which was interesting for the first hour but quickly lost interest. Not too long ago I've also tried the Golem VR attraction in Prague's Hamley and it kinda sucked. They give you a backpack with a computer in it so that you can walk around without being tied to some cable. They have a large playfield where you can roam freely while taking part in a boring adventure. You can see your hands (via the motion leap) but the whole experience is dull and ends pretty quickly.

Anyway, the Oculus Go was released not too long ago as a massive consumer product: it's cheaper (~200$), it has embedded microphone and headphones, it's slick as fuck, it's comfortable, and it has the best lenses on the market. I was a bit skeptical at first, because of my experience with the cardboard, so I bought one for my parents.

I finally tried it, and let me say that this is the revolution we've all been waiting for. This is the device that everyone should buy. I still don't own a Vive or a Rift, but this thing is so practical that I'm pretty sure I would use it more than the bigger headsets if I had both. It just works and is good enough for a lot of experiences and games. No setup, you place it on your head whenever you want to play and then you just play.

I had a ton of varied experience since then, but my favorite one is Catan. You probably know the board game, well they made it for Virtual Reality as well! Rather than a thousand words, here's a video of what it looks like:

I happened to click on the join an online game button, which instantly propulsed me into a room with two other people. They seemed to have been there for a while and where already chatting. One was a wizard and the other one was a mask. Once I joined they greeted me and explained to me how I could choose a different avatar. I chose a sheep head and we played for 40 minutes and even shook hands at the end. It was magical. I did not expect VR to be such a big social platform. You are propulsed into games with people and are forced to speak to them. No "mute microphone" or no indication that you're going to be confronted to real people. Compared to your typical PC game which is a pretty quiet and asocial experience, it's weird. I loved it.

I know I haven't been posting much in here. I suck.

I've moved to London a few weeks ago. Felicia and I took some time to find an apartment and settle, but it finally happened. Now we're home. Or rather a temporary home since we might go back to the US at some point. When? Who knows, not even my company's lawyer have a clue.

So now we're back in Europe for an indefinite amount of time. I quite like it here. It's dense, it's vertically smaller and it's not as spread. I can finally take walks, first because London has real public districts with pedestrian streets, secondly because I actually feel safe here. The diversity is amazing, you hear a lot of foreign languages as you walk across the city (kind of like Paris). In my new office I often see people talking in their home dialect, or in english with their strong foreign accents. People from different races and religions co-exist. Sure in Chicago they were there, but they were sticking within their groups. Here you can actually make friends who look like they're from a totally different culture. Everyone is integrated. Of course I'm biased by my first weeks and my vision might get darker as I spend more time in these lands. But one thing that shouldn't change is how good the Asian food is in here :)

I'm still crypto'ing, although I've had a hard time finishing anything. I can say that I've read a lot and learned a lot about crypto in general but I've failed to dig deeper in one single topic. My job doesn't help since it requires me to jungle around with a lot of different concepts. I do not mind, as I still lack an understanding of a lot of things in crypto (just a few months ago was I learning for the first time about sponge constructions). One day I'll like something enough to stick with it.

In other news I bought a Nintendo Switch, and I spent quite some time playing the new Zelda (as well as SnipperClips). I don't think I've spent that much time playing in years. The last time I remember spending evenings and nights staring at my screen was when I played Counterstrike and League of Legends. I really like this console. It's portable, and so we've played it while moving to London; in the airplane and in the different Airbnbs we stayed at.

I have not much things to say. I hope life can get stable again, at least enough so that I can rest a bit (and maybe take some vacations).

J'ai décidé d'essayer la peinture à huile !

J'ai toujours cru que c'était trop d'investissement de commencer un truc pareil, mais en fait non. Pour 40$ j'ai réussis à acheter plein de pinceaux, plein de tubes de couleur et une dizaine de toiles pour peinture à huile :)

Ci-dessous mon premier, puis mon deuxième tableau. Je débute oh hein !

J'ai fait une petite vidéo de passage que j'ai filmé avec ma gopro. Ca tremble encore pas mal, je pense que je vais commencer à filmer seulement en slow motion, ou alors il me faut un trépied.

I just tried HTC Vive.

My life has changed.

I tried VR when I was very young, a bit less than 20 years ago I think, the headset was enormous and heavy, the screen was tiny, the controller was shitty, I got a huge headache after playing for a minute or two. The game was Doom I think. Can't remember much about it anyway.

So yeah I wasn't expecting much, even though people were getting really excited.

Virtual Reality

VR (or Virtual Reality) is the shit right now. Oculus Rift, the first one bootstrapped by a kickstarter campaign, got bought by Facebook last year. Then other VR systems were announced, Project Morpheus (Sony) and HTC Vive (HTC and Steam), and Hololens (Microsoft). Microsoft Hololens not really being VR but AR (Augmented Reality) because you can see the room where you are, whereas the others completely shut down the reality around you and give you a totally immersed kind of experience.

HTC Vive

If you're reading this I guess you probably already know most of that and are just interested by my impressions on the HTC Vive.

Well it was f'ing awesome.

They put me in a small room, bedroom type of room, asked me to stand over a white cross on the floor and placed the headset on my head. It was not that heavy, but not that light as well and I got afraid to get a sore neck after playing for too long (which I didn't get after the 25min demo). They then placed a headphone around my ears (which is not included in the headset, contrarily to the Rift) and the world around me was now gone.

I was at the center of a white room, in front of a "Push to play" panel, surrounded by frames presenting the different demos.

The screen was a bit weird at first, I don't know quite well how to describe it, I know I was looking at a screen. But I started to move my head around, and to move my feet a bit and wow. I was in that room. I completely forgot that I was looking at a screen, and never thought about it again for the rest of the demo. I was in a room that didn't fucking exist.

Hands on

I heard the guy in the room who was taking care of me, and reality came back, he was talking to me through a microphone connected to my headphones. He told me "I'm gonna hand you two controllers". I saw two controllers flying toward me, and I grabbed them, they were not exactly the same as the ones I was seeing and I could feel the hands of the guy handing them over to me which were not in my new reality. Also I didn't have any feet. It didn't bug me so much, I still felt like I was in another real world. It felt crazy, totally unreal. And this was only the introduction room. The controllers were moving exactly like I was moving them in my hands, I pressed a button and a ballon popped from my controller, I pushed it and it went away. The physics was exact. I blew up another one, with a different color (I could use one of the controller as a color wheel) and tried to move it around with my two controllers, it worked. "Wow" I said outloud. My skepticism went away in a flash, I was sur-excited, this was real, they didn't fuck up VR, it really worked.

He explained to me that I would see the wall if I walked too close to one of them. So I tried to walk straight until I reached something. A wall appeared in my vision, like a real wall, except it was transparent. Like a virtual wall in my now "real" world. I tried to reach for the wall, My right hand holding the controller went a bit further than the virtual wall and hit the real wall.

Under water

The screen went black, then I reappered underwater, surrounded by fish. I tried to touch them and only got them to swim away from me. I looked up, I could see the sun reflecting at me from above the ocean. I turned and realized I was on an wreck, on its deck. I walked a bit around, still scared of hitting a real life wall. Then I saw some big fish that I tried to catch but they never went close enough to me. And then a huge whale came, and I got a thrill. I heard it before I saw it, and I knew where it was because of where the sound was coming from. I turned, the whale came and stood right next to the boat and kept doing that huge noise while looking at me.

Trippy, wow, what was going to happen?

The screen went black

The Kitchen

I was now in a kitchen, I had more freedom, this time I really felt like I could go anywhere around me. I looked at my controller, they were hands! Like huge white hands, mickey-mouse kind of hands. That was awesome, I started rotating my controllers and pressing the triggers and I felt like they were my own hands! They were moving exactly like I wanted them to move. I grabbed a bottle of wine and threw it in front of me, it broke against a wall. I grabbed a knife and tried to cut a tomato, the knife broke in pieces cutting the fruit in half on the way. I closed a microwave on my right and pressed on one of its button, it turned on and after a while emitted a beep. I could do anything, I had total freedom, I was in a real kitchen that didn't look real. But I wasn't bugged by the graphics, I felt like if played on a normal screen I would have thought "the graphics are meh", but presented like that, like a totally interactive experience, I felt like everything was real.

There was a recipe on the wall on my left that read: 2 tomatoes, 2 mushrooms, red sauce and salt. I picked up two tomatoes and dropped them in a pot, looked around for the mushrooms, saw something weird on the table and stopped. How could I know if that was the mushroom. And then it came to me, why didn't I just grab it? So I grabbed it like I grabbed everything else in this kitchen, by moving my hand to it and pressing the right trigger like I would press the object and it was now in my hand. I looked at the object from several angles, moving it around with my fake hands, and saw that it was a mushroom. Hop, in the pot! :)

What about the 2nd mushroom? I took a look in the fridge and found my 2nd mushroom. In the pot as well! The sauce? Right on the counter. Pressed a bit on it while it was dropping in the pot, so it went faster (but did it do something? I don't know). Finally grabbed the salt and shook it over the pot like I would have shaken a real salt cellar. It worked...

And then I got a bit sad, thinking at the other VR headsets that don't allow you to move around (with your own feet) and control things with your (own) hands.

Painting in 3D

I was then in a new black room. I was instructed to look at my controllers, the right one would be my brush, the left one would be my settings. I pressed on the left one and a plate full of color came out, like an hologram, I clicked on one of them with my right controller to pick up a color and I could now paint in the space in front of me, anywhere. It felt totally different, like I was creating a structure in 3D. I painted a box in space, and turned around it, inspecting it from all angles. I thought a fire would be nice in it, changed brushed and placed one there. Then I added rotating rainbows around the edges of my cube. It was beautiful. I placed my head inside of my art, I went around it placing these lines of colors everywhere. This was truly beautiful.

My mind got very busy thinking about my artists friend and what they could do with that, all the possibilities... and then my world disappeared.

Portal

The last demo was a "real" game this time: Portal. I was instructed to play around in a room, opening one of the drawer I discovered a multitude of small box offices in an open space, filled with small black sticks people working. They then realized I was looking at them and all went batshit crazy. It was like that scene in Men in Black when Will Smith look at that little planet in their HQ. It was fascinating, it was so real (I know I say that word a lot).

By the way I think this was all done in Source Engine 2. I don't know how good were the graphics though, I just know everything looked completely real to me.

I then opened a switch an a robot entered the room. A crazy robot, it all looked pretty scary like I could get hit for real, I just stepped back and then the robot got stopped by a robotic arm and fell to the ground... I was then handled the task of repairing it, and like in the movies, I dismantled the inners of the robot and could interact with each of its parts, suspended in the air like no gravity with affecting them... I don't want to talk too much about this demo because it's worth being surprised by what happens :)

And then I was done. I removed the headset and came back to life. I couldn't believed what just happened.

Moar

I managed to get into the room while someone else was taking the demo, you could see on the screen what they were seeing but I was not allowed to film. There was a sensor (sensors?) in the room as well to detect the movement, the demonstrator told me that being in front of it could disturb the movement detection.

I don't think I have much else to say apart the fact that I'm gonna buy that when it gets out. This is the future.