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The end-user experience with a VR Store

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
I recently had an interesting experience with store buying that I thought was worth sharing.

Going in to the Holiday Weekend I have a number of family/friends visiting daily. With that comes a lot of VR time (everyone looks forward to trying it). One of the younger family members is getting involved in the Harry Potter universe, and after everyone took a break from Beat Saber, the youngen asked me if there are any Harry Potter VR games. I did a quick Google search and landed on Steam. I went through with the purchase for $9.99 and tried to launch the experience with my Rift. After multiple attempts and several PC reboots... I gave up. SteamVR and its version of this VR experience kept locking up my PC. Luckily, Steam has a great refund policy which I took full advantage of in this case.

I busted out Oculus GO and did a quick search, and bam! There it was, and for only $4.99 - a great deal. Once I went through with the purchase I gave the GO headset to the youngen (who was able to explore GO's VR environment while actively monitoring the download). This alone is something that can't be easily done with the Rift for someone of that age who is not very 'tech savvy.' Plus the SteamVR interface makes the entire process significantly more complex (again, a very young target audience).

With GO all I had to do was click 'purcahse' and enter my PIN, the youngster could do the rest. The ease-of-use for this type of experience really is unparalleled with the current market.

In terms of user-friendliness for mass appeal - while embracing those who are not tech savvy - I would rate the user experiences as such:
Oculus GO > Oculus Home (Rift) > SteamVR

This observation is not meant to classify either the Rift's Home Environment nor SteamVR as "bad." I'm simply sharing what I consider to be an outstanding "ease-of-use" implementation for the Oculus GO software experience.

This is just my personal observation; here is an article that presents other thoughts on how the Oculus GO shines when it comes to user experiences in a professional setting:

Reducing the cost to commit
A major barrier for the industry to
commit to VR has been an understable one — price of entry. Buying an
Oculus Rift or HTC Vive or even a Gear VR with a phone is an investment
of $1000 dollars or more. By not having to buy additional
hardware — just one device, the Oculus Go brings the cost to commit to
VR by a significant margin. If you are an AEC company, big or small,
chances are you will get value by a minimum investment of $200USD for
presenting your projects immersively.

Faster and less clumsy presentations
We are aware of client presentations where there are uncomfortable waiting moments while you setup the cables or just get the phone to work inside the Gear VR. Nevermind, disabling the notifications or ensuring the phone is charged if your are using mobile VR. Oculus Go makes life easier in such situations — just one device that needs to be charged. Wireless and without any hassles — it should make it easier for more and more architects to feel confident that no hardware slip-ups or complications will make their presentations tricky with clients. Speed matters — and Go delivers that.

https://medium.com/sentiovr/what-the-oculus-go-means-virtual-reality-in-architecture-61077333aa69


2 REPLIES 2

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
But was the Harry Potter VR experience any good?

 😉 


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
They loved it
🙂