Be Excellent To Each Other

As there's a few people who picked up a Cardboard headset recently and there's a fair amount of utter shite out there I thought it might be useful to have a thread listing genuinely decent or interesting apps and games. Most, if not all, of my list are just amusing toys mind you so don't expect too much!

Squarepusher - Stor Eiglass: obviously your interest in this will depend on whether you like Squarepusher's glitchy drill 'n' bass music but, if you do, this VR video is amusingly bonkers.
Lamper: a simple game where you play a firefly flying down an endless tunnel. You control the position using your head and you have to avoid obstacles while picking up, well, pick-ups.
Titans of Space: I mentioned this one before and if there's a 'killer app' this would be it. It takes you on a tour of our solar system, and slightly beyond, using VR to give you an appreciation of the mind-boggling distances and sizes involved. Brilliant stuff.
Roller coasters: obviously the first thing you do is install a load of roller coaster simulators, because of course you do, so here's a few I've installed that are decent. 1, 2, 3.
Crazy Swing: basically the roller coaster concept turned up to 11. If you want to show the headset off to someone this is probably the best app.
Jack White VR: some footage from a Jack White concert recorded in 3D and played back through the app so you can look around as it plays. I've only given this one a brief look so I'm not entirely sure how good it is, and obviously if you've no interest in Jack White you're not going to give a shit.
Corridoom: a first person endless runner where you move your head to direct your character and try to avoid hitting any walls. Hard as fuck.
Run4Fun: another 'control a runner with your head' type of thing except this time you're trying not to fall of a series of floating platforms instead of trying to avoid hitting walls.

I'll check some of these out, especially the Squarepusher thing. I think the only thing I'd add that's much cop is this one:

Chair In A Room - brief but effective horror that shows it off really well.

Great idea.

I keep going back to Swivel Gun VR because the sense of movement is unreal. I walked into the bedroom wall playing that on Monday night.
Debris Defrag is a simple asteroid shooter but the sense of depth is one of the best I have encountered.

I'll give them a shot when I get home.

I tried Chair in a Room but it didn't impress me much at the time; I can't remember why though so I'll give it another shot later on.

It scared the shit out of me, but then I could barely handle playing P.T. Demo. Headphones are a must, though.

Funnily enough, I've just ordered a more robust, plastic cardboard headset with straps and stuff. The knock off cardboard one and its dodgy lenses has gone in the bin. So app suggestions are very welcome

Actually, anything for younger children? Say in the 3-5 range?

Nothing specific that I've seen but quite a lot of the ones already mentioned are basically just simple rides with nothing nasty about them. I showed it to our daughter she's 21 months old, she'd hold it up to her face then kept just moving it away and looking around the room before looking again, clearly baffled at the box's tardis-like properties.

Cough syrup to excess and a bag of liquorice helps.

I liked chair in a room but it did seem quite "HA BOO". The insidious one is half decent if also somewhat cheesy.

The Walking New York video on VRSE is really good. At the end you're on a helicopter in New York and the sense of vertigo made my legs wobble. Again headphones really useful on this one.

I've just installed a shit-ton of new apps after trawling through Google Play there (so many so that I've just realised there's actually a limit to the number of apps you can put in a folder in the vanilla launcher, I just thought it would scroll) so hopefully I'll have some new stuff to recommend after tonight.

Sound.

*offers fist bump*

I don't know if that's being offered to me but I'll take it:



Fake edit: well, it seems Beex really doesn't like emoji at all.

Works on iOS. Also emoticons was a perfectly good word, why did everyone start using the massively less explanatory half-Japanese word for them?!

Which one did you go for?

I can imagine the google cardboard construction not lasting that long really. Plus massive sweat marks were multiple people's foreheads have been.

Really? Try posting this one on the forum then:

http://emojipedia.org/fisted-hand-sign/

Oh no, that's just me being a dumbass. I saw the fist you posted and thought that was it, rather than you posting an image of it.

Nah, I posted the image as an alternative because when I actually tried to post the emoji Beex did this:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x91\x8A' for column 'post_text' at row 1 [1366]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.


Something to do with multi-byte character is my guess.

This one (pasted on my phone, so fingers crossed)
http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/111719546422?_mwBanner=1

I'm not bothered about the games but could we get pictures of you lot with cardboard boxes stuck to your faces? I imagine you all look quite amusing.

Too late: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/google-matt ... ew-master/

Tried that swing one. I feel a bit sick.

This thread is confusing to someone who has not heard of a Google Cardboard, so I tried googling it but am still confused. I thought it might have been a phone or not iPad thingy (what's the word I am looking for?!?! Gah... Giant phone without the phone tablet! Anyway, on Amazon it seems to be a cardboard box to mount something in?

Is it like these things we had sent to the office last week?

They weren't made of plastic, but you put a phone in snd could watch apps like a roller coaster ride where you can look around you, and stuff like that. But I don't think it had anything to do with Google and was plastic.

Always upside down.

Though, if I click on the picture for it to take me to the attachment page, it is the correct way up!

yes Mimi

Yes, Meems. That picture is basically what I've just bought. The Google Cardboard project was designed to encourage developers to make VR more accessible.

yes Mimi

Ah, I see. I think this one could hold all kinds of phones, though: iPhones, the big phones that some people have... I don't know what they are, but the screens always seem to be broken... It had one of those type in when we were looking at it.

Aw... This one looks so sad http://www.cnet.com/uk/pictures/a-close ... -photos/2/

Oh, it's the right way up now.

This place is confusing!

Wait till you see the 3D version.

If I Google for 'Google Cardboard' the second result is the Wikipedia page which seems to explain it pretty clearly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cardboard

The Google Cardboard stuff isn't just for Android; iPhones will work with it perfectly well as well.

Also, those big phones that some people have really are just phones with slightly larger screens; nothing special about them. I mean, you've seen an iPhone 6+ right? It really is just an iPhone 6 with a bigger screen which is the same for the Android side of the fence.

Hang on a minute, are there iPhone apps that work with this card board thing then?

I've completely ignored it as I thought it was an android only kinda thing.

I used to leave the family's 286 on overnight rendering those things from pictures/patterns I made on the Amiga.

We'll blow me, apparently I'm getting this cardboard thing now.

That one took 2 seconds to render... ONLINE. Times have changed, man.

What was that scenery drawing program that came on a AF cover disk? Was it called Vista? It would take hours to render a landscape the PS4 dumps out in less than a lamb's tale

I suspect you'll find a lot fewer Cardboard app on the iOS side of the fence mind, and the Cardboard demo app itself isn't all that brilliant. I can't tell for sure though because of course you can't really search for anything on the iTunes website.

Yes. But the results were worth the wait.

Well I just typed Google cardboard into the App Store and a fair few games/demos whatever popped up including the ones that have been highlighted on here before. For the price I might as well see what you're all going on about.

It is super fun and well worth the price of half a dance at Flirtz.

I can see those things really easily, however, I can't make out what it is - it looks a bit like a head with something jutting out to the left, like a miner's lamp.

I had a run through some other apps last night and, thought most of them were pish as expected, I'd recommend these:

InMind VR: a rail shooter of sorts with an Inner Space style theme. Notable mostly for being quite a polished experience and I'll be curious to see what the full game that this is a demo of comes out like.
War of Words: a very short but pretty and interesting little thing produced by the BBC. Essentially a VR visualisation of the Siegfried Sassoon poem ‘The Kiss’.

I also spent some time with the Jack White app I mentioned before and it's very engaging. Annoyingly though there doesn't seem to be a way to skip songs and the video quality of the first one, filmed in an outdoor arena in the rain, is by far the worst. If you can get through that the subsequent tracks make much better use of the technology and, weirdly, I found most amusement from watching the front few rows of the crowd and mentally slagging some of them off for being terrible hipsters. Also: by God Jack White's violin player is cute as fuck.

Oh, and I forgot about Zombie Warfare. This was an interesting one because it requires a control pad to play so I found myself in the slightly ludicrous position of having my PS4 pad (connected by cable to my phone) in one hand while holding the headset on with the other. It works fine because you only need one joystick and a trigger button on the pad and the rest is done by head tracking. So, a fairly stupid setup and my right arm was fucking aching by the end of what is basically a demo but definitely the closest experience to what I imagine playing a 'real' game on an Occulus would be like so good fun.

it's a simplified version of the picture you posted

Ah! Yes, that makes sense: where the unit is sticking out to the left I thought it was a miners lamp. Awesome