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Your Magic VR Moment

cybereality
Grand Champion

If you’ve had that “wow”
moment in VR, we want to hear from you! We’d like to collect the best Oculus
stories from around the world. Help us capture exactly what makes VR so
special, by telling us about the key event that first made you a believer in
VR. Your insights will help us as we think through the next phase of where to
take Oculus products. What was your magic VR moment?

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
113 REPLIES 113

leo1954au
Adventurer
When I first got my rift and tried Oculus Dreamdeck with the Tyrannosaurus Rex thumping around the corner was a WOW moment for me and First Contact with the Touch

Anonymous
Not applicable
Genuinely (not trying to troll) just had a serious 'wow' moment in SteamVR Home. The social experience there is exactly what I'm really hoping Oculus Rooms is going to be like. You have your (customisable!) Home space, you can bring up a menu and in literally a couple of clicks of a button, you can suddenly in a social 'room' chat with other players. You're able to talk to them while the room's environment downloads, and then you're plonked straight in. You have a huge range of things you can do; you can spawn, resize and place all sorts of models and primary volumes, you can customise your avatar basically to the limits of your imagination, you can have working gun models, gravity guns, all sorts of stuff. You can just spend time nipping around exploring the environments with other players.

The best thing is it looks great and it's just so easy to quickly be in touch with/in a space with other players. I literally stopped after hanging out with this group of people for about 20 minutes and the thought, unbidden, crossed my mind; 'oh, this is what VR is meant to be about'.
Fingers crossed the Oculus Rooms folks spend some time checking it out and seeing what does/doesn't work. I'm looking forward to seeing their implementation!

Zoomie
Expert Trustee
That's not trolling @Elpoc.  Trolling would be creating a brand new threat to tell us about it, adding that Oculus was obviously doomed to failure because Oculus Home doesn't have identical features.  Something something walled garden evil Facebook.

Quick edit so my own post doesn't fall into the "destructive" category - I'm seeing a lot of positive buzz about Steam Home.  My allergies to Alder tress coincided with a heat wave this weekend so I didn't spend any time in VR.  I'll have to check it out this week.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C Clarke

nalex66
MVP
MVP
Yeah, I've been hearing good things as well. Been meaning to fire up SteamVR and have a look, but my long weekend was entirely spent working on the house. I'll have to try to find some time during the week.

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo

vrpat
Protege
Sightline: The Chair
There was a scene where the brick walls began closing in as you turn around and it got tighter and tighter. And just as you think it's game over, the walls disappear and you're floating in space far above planet Earth. I just love how the developer had used those extreme opposites to blow my mind.

Apollo 11 was another experience that did something to me, which I still haven't let go. After takeoff, as I was blasting away into space, I looked out the tiny little window on the side. There was Earth. And it was getting smaller. I thought to myself, that right there is the only home I've ever known. I'm leaving everything I know behind. There is a possibility I might never go back there. And then I thought about the importance of that historic event for human kind. When I catched that pencil slowly drifting past my head I just lost it.

Then there's Tiltbrush, and Medium. I've always wanted to draw in mid-air since I was a kid. I used to run around imagining the trail following my fingers. And I just knew somehow I would do it someday. I saw Tiltbrush's early concepts where there were no controllers involved, but instead some kind of rotating canvas, which back then seemed awesome enough. Then Google acquired them and they went quiet for a while.

In the meantime I got the Leap Motion, and tried some VR demos which actually let me draw in augmented reality. The early tracking on Leap Motion was nowhere close to what it is now. But it damned sure made me one of the first artists in the world realizing Pablo Picazzo's light-paintings in real-time. Now that creative applications like Tiltbrush, Quill and Medium are out there, I've had great artists that I look up to, see my work as well.

It's one thing playing with VR alone in my apartment, but showing it to my friends and family and seeing their often extreme reactions to it made me realize how amazing it really was. I've scared grown men out of their chairs. I've made upcoming biologists cry at being finally able to see the giant jellyfish they were studying from the ocean floor. And I've had so many moments filled with laughter at all the crazy stuff VR let us do.

I had an eight hour conversation with someone in Altspace once. I haven't even done that in real life. Which to me proved Social VR works, it's just not mainstream yet.

Right now, just experimenting with what's available, doing things that have never been done before is what blows my mind. I'm not a developer yet, but I would love to be. There are stories to tell and genres to create.

vaiman
Honored Guest

Project Cars.

I've done the track Spa Francorchamps numerous times previously and almost become bored with it. When I started it in VR... WOW. Nothing compares to it and I can't play the game any other way now.

My best moments come from demonstrating the Rift... from young kids to older family members, it's just priceless and there seems to be an experience that suits everyone.

I'm much like Zoomie and chase those moments when I feel like a kid again... when I used to mess about on a ZX Spectrum with my brother. There aren't many things today that'll bring that back for either of us but I think it's happened a couple of times with the Rift.

The Dreamdeck T-Rex was just superb, partly because I was worried about whether CV1 would live up to my hopes. The other was surprising, in that it's not a perfect experience, but using FSX with FlyInside and looking out of the Cessna windscreen at the stars while still on the runway felt incredibly real.

The Touch demo/tutorial was another magic moment.

Ernimus_Prime
Heroic Explorer
I think Star Trek Bridge Crew is going to be a wish come true on Tuesday.  But I really wish there was a Star Wars X-wing vs TIE fighter VR experience. That would be the cherry on top of the pie. 
ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (WI-FI), Ryzen 7 3700x, 16 gigs ram DDR-4 3600 MHZ. SSD XPG 8200 pro 1 TB. WD Black 4 TB. Windows 10 PRO 64-bit. MSI VENTUS 3 RTX 3080 OC, Primary: MSI MAG274QRF-QD 2nd monitor: Acer Predator XG270HU 1440p@144 hz, Phanteks Enthoo Pro case. Corsair rm750x PSU. Rift S.

MariusPolonius
Heroic Explorer
I was thinking what was my magic moment or maybe total WOW! Moment, and it had to be when I went to Best Buy to make sure that the expensive piece of equipment I was about to order is not gonna be some over-hyped toy. After placing the goggles on my head my first reaction was Oh I see the screen door effect! Then after the brief demonstration on how to use it I selected The Climb to see what the games are all about, it was cool, but I wasn't that impressed, it felt like I was pulling a screen downwards with my hands, rather than climbing. But then I asked the guy giving me demo what happens if I let go, and that was my WOW moment, the sensation of falling down was OUT OF THIS WORLD! I must've climbed and dropped down maybe 10 times before I completed the demo, but I was sold! When I got back home I walked to my computer and ordered the Rift.
Since then there was plenty of WOW! Moments. Starting with First Contact.

Veraxus
Protege
I played through all of Alien: Isolation on my DK2, but there's one particular moment that is far and away my favorite, most cherished gaming memory.

The first several hours of gameplay are fairly uneventful. On a flat screen, it might have been tedious, but in VR I wasn't playing a game - I was legitimately stranded on a mostly-empty space station. It was eery and cool and I could take my time, like I was playing an adventure game. The game so successfully lured me into a false sense of security that what came next is the only case of nope-quitting I've ever experienced.

I accidentally tripped an alarm and need to disable the lockdown to continue on, so I make way to the security office and begin the process of disabling it... but it doesn't seem to be working. I hear a bang above my head and look up just to see a panel fall from the ceiling. Something moves in the fog, snake-like, uncurling itself... and falls to the floor. I'm startled, but not scared yet. Slowly, it stands... it's no "man in suit" - it's impossibly thin and lanky, completely inhuman, and it's huge... I've forgotten I was playing a game, and I'm panicking as much as my character is. I drop the controller and that reminds me I'm wearing a headset, and rip it off my head, pulse racing at 170.

It took me about 20 minutes to calm down before I was able to pick the game back up again. It triggered a kind of existential fear response I've only ever felt twice before: once during a night terror as a child, and once when I was pulled out to sea by a very nasty rip-current and exhausted myself trying to get out of it (I was thankfully saved only by a very attentive lifeguard).

So if you see me harping on how we need Alien: Isolation updated for consumer hardware, it's because I consider it, far and away, not just the greatest VR game ever made, but one of the greatest PC games ever made.
My PC: Asus ROG STRIX Z490-I | Intel Core i7-10700K @ 3.8Ghz | 32GB RAM | MSI Ventus 3X GeForce 3090 | Samsung 840 EVO 2TB SSD X2 | Windows 11 x64