Virtual Reality is a hot topic these days. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to test an Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers. PlayStation VR and HTC Vive have also been released lately. Android Developers like me have their Cardboards, which are a very low-cost option.

Daydream VR

With the release of their Pixel devices, Google announced the Daydream VR. Similar to the Cardboard, you place your mobile phone in the VR headset and don’t need additional high-end hardware. For 70€ it is still a low-cost solution, if you don’t factor in the expensive phones.

My first attempt at trying Daydream VR unfortunately was not successful. I got the small Pixel phone, which worked flawlessly except when being used in the Daydream VR headset. It had regular reboots, a problem many others around the web have as well. And even worse, it had extreme visual drift as you can see in the video below.

It is hard to tell how bad that visual drift is. Your vision turning around while your body tells you there is no change in orientation makes you feel sick within a minute.

So after playing around an making a factory reset, I decided to return the device and get the Pixel XL instead. Turned out this was a good choice. With the Pixel XL everything works flawlessly. Head tracking has no noticeable delay and the touch controller works great.

Experience

Compared to a Cardboard this setup is a great improvement. A Cardboard only has a single button for user interaction. The touch controller gives navigating a whole new dimension. In games it is used as a magic stick, for controlling a steering wheel or tilting a playground to move a ball around. Every game seems to have its own way of navigating around. I believe we will see a lot more navigation styles before a few will crystallize as standard.

While Daydream with the controller is much better than before, you also see what is still missing. Turning your head around works great, but moving is not possible at all. In a VR world like Fantastic Beasts I want to move around and look at the beasts from all sides. In most of the applications this is not possible.

Graphics are pretty good with the right game/application. The detail level is impressively close to an Oculus Rift. However, in both VR systems you recognize single pixels. Even a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels is not much in VR mode, because it has to split for two eyes and fill the whole viewport. But every current VR system has this problem.