In trying the HTC Vive, the thing I liked the most was using the Tilt Brush – drawing and creating in a 3D space. I liked how it forced me to draw something in its entirety, not just the flat 2D perspective. For example, if I were to draw a house and then walk inside of it, I’d have to think about what the house looked like from the inside, the outside, and all 4 walls. As someone creating on a 2D space, I force the viewer to observe the piece in a certain way. In the 3D space I lose a lot of that ability. What I also liked was the ability to play back someone else’s drawing. This places so much more emphasis on the process and observing someone else at work and making mistakes. I like that I can literally put myself in someone else’s shoes and follow their actions step by step. To expand on the experience, I would want the ability to stop, slow, rewind, etc. in following someone else’s process to really use it as an educational tool. I would also want the ability to look at something in the real world and try to draw it. For example, if I go to draw a mountain in the VR realm of Tilt Brush, I am only drawing the mountain from my memory, as opposed to drawing the mountain by looking at it.

The piece of VR that I liked the least was the limited sensory feedback to go with the very immersive visual environment. For example, I wanted to be feeling the textures, heat, and weight of something as I held it. I wanted to feel the swoosh in the water as the whale tale flew by me. When skiing down the mountain, I wanted to feel the pull of gravity as I flew off the cliff. The design team could create a room where you do VR to give you the illusion of some of these senses. For example, a room could have wind and/or rain functionality. A room could have different forces (ex: tipping side to side) to give the illusion of the various forces that the user is experiencing in the game. The user could also have gloves or a bodysuit that changes heat or somehow gives varying senses of texture. As shown in the video and discussed in the reading, physical blocks can be used in the physical world, paired with image manipulation to give the user the illusion that they are playing with multiple blocks and physically touching them, but actually only playing with a single block.