#vr

It has been 10 years since I ran Cardboctober, a month-long hackathon in which I created something new for Google Cardboard each day and wrote about it. I considered doing it again this year, but my time is spread thinner these days than it was in 2016, so I thought I’d do a bit of a retrospective on the WebVR and Google Cardboard scene instead.

I sold my HTC Vive back in 2020 and bought an Oculus Quest. Was it an impulsive lockdown treat? Perhaps; but it was time for an upgrade. I went for the 128GB model, and had to order from the German Amazon store as nowhere in the UK had stock at the time. I was impressed with Amazon Prime in this case, and then in awe of their logistics network. I ordered at around midday, and then received the Oculus Quest 24 hours later from Germany at no extra cost.

Today I’m reviewing the DPVR E3. This is a Virtual Reality headset with a high resolution display, comfortable straps and an experience that’s similar to the Oculus Rift.

The Virtoba S1 is a Daydream compatible controller from China that costs around £15 ($20). Let me just start with saying I’ve got a lot of cheap Bluetooth controllers – and for the most part they’re crap. I hit the “Buy now” button for the Virtoba S1 half expecting this to be the case, but I was quite happily wrong.

I enabled Google Daydream support on my OnePlus 3T today and I’m pretty impressed.

Since launching the UX of VR website last year I’ve been looking for ways to keep on top of new VR content. For most of the last year I relied solely on a mixture of Google Alerts, manually using the search functionality on websites and browsing VR blogs daily. Here’s how I improved on that process.

I bought an HTC Vive last November (a week before the Black Friday sales, doh!) and have spent the time since trying to get the most out of it. So here are some highlights, thoughts and other musings about the HTC Vive.

In October 2016 I spent every day of the month creating something for Google Cardboard using JavaScript — Cardboctober. Since then I’ve been preoccupied with a couple of other mostly VR-related things…

As part of the JS Oxford-organised Summer of Hacks, I co-organised the “Game Dev Day” hack day in Oxford. This is the second time I’ve held an event during the Summer of Hacks (the previous event being SusHack #3 last year!).

I gave this talk at JS Oxford in November 2015. The talk is about using JavaScript and various web APIs to create Google Cardboard experiences.

I’ve been trying to find resources on the subject of User Experience and User Interface design in Virtual Reality a lot lately, as I’m thinking about Google Cardboard, and preparing demos for a talk about using JavaScript to build Google Cardboard experiences.