This was my very first chance to experience VR!! It was great!

I think the best parts of my VR experience were fairly obvious. I loved the immersiveness. The whale experience and the mountain with the caterpillar/dog fetching thing were great introductions to the interactions that are possible with the Vive.

I liked the explorative nature of this experience (akin to the explorative nature of Vivian, Andrew, and Owen’s project), where I was able to little by little uncover features. It started with basic stuff, like realizing that I was able to walk around the virtual space, crouch to see things at different angles, and lean in to see something closer up. Then I started figuring out other abilities, like the ability to teleport myself (It was great to see how naturally a desire to climb upwards arose, just like on real mountains!!) or the ability to throw a stick for the caterpillardog. Even in these scenes that didn’t have as many usage possibilities (like Tiltbrush), they were enjoyable, and even a little surreal.

I think that the biggest thing that was suboptimal about my first VR experience was the fact that I couldn’t see that well. I wore glasses that didn’t fit properly in the headset, and had to remove them. In an exit interview with Dina, I found myself repeatedly circling back to the frustration of not being able to see clearly. Next time I will definitely wear contact lenses! It would be nice as well if the lens in the headset could have a “focus” on it like a pair of binoculars or a camera, so that glasses wearers could fix their vision, although I’m not sure whether this really would work, or would be simple, or is simply portraying my total lack of understanding of how lenses work…