I found the HTC’s world to be amazingly rich and spatial. By the word spatial I mean that instead of feeling that you are in a “box” with graphics, you feel actually feel a sense of gravity and its force you. I felt different in the mountaintop scene from the underwater whale scene. In the mountaintop scene, I had the sense that the ground was sloping down away from me when I was facing downhill. When I tried to follow the little doggie-bot, I was a little apprehensive of losing my balance if I didn’t take into account distributing my weight. The underwater scene was beautiful for the sense of scale – between the tiny flickers of the fish schools shimmering around, and the gigantic whale so big that you can only see parts of it at one time. The scale of the whale was an interesting decision in just how much you could experience at a given time: how big is so big? I could only see an eye, then the mouth, a fin, and then as it swooshes past me, a tail that came so close to me that I was afraid I would be knocked off my perch.

The drawing application is pretty amazing in that you felt a spatial relationship in proximity to the “painting” you create. I think one could spend hours in there, which kind of is a scary thought.

I think what I liked least about the experience is that it was still very much an enclosed environment that separates one from the actual world. I find the Mixed Reality described in the WIRED magazine extremely fascinating because it does not take one away from the “real” world that one exists in. I also like that it blurs the identification of one’s state of mind as to defining what is “reality” and what is “fiction.”