Samsung VR goggles: just plug your Galaxy

This morning, at precisely 11:09 am I was at a Kasabian gig at the Brixton Academy. I was on stage. I was crowd-surfing. I was elated. Then, I was in New York, on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the roof of the Empire State Building. Then it got weird and awesome: I was flying over Manhattan. I looked up and there was the chopper, right above me, so close it made me laugh nervously. It was surreal: a bright, crispy morning and I was flying for the first time in my life. When I took my headphones and VR glasses off, I was at Visualise, at their offices in Second Home, London. I so wanted to go back up there.

Not many people have watched VR content to-date. VR provides you with 360 degrees freedom to turn around, look up and down, absorb the scene being in the scene, feel the sound wrap around you almost physically. Your senses are hyped to interpret what they see and hear as real.  You are inside the film. In fact, there is no film. You have been transported into another dimension of existence.

When the point-of-view becomes “you” in 360 dimensions, when you are the multi-angled 6x-camera-rig, then reality gets altered to a dimension of inclusion, of freedom, of limitless spacial choices. See for yourself:

There are already various tech giants developing the software and hardware for this. What the world will want is the actual content, and this is what pioneers like Visualise do. They are a VR Production Company, an independent VR studio, a VR agency. There is not even a name for what they actually do, such is the level of early days novelty that VR has at present.

VR turns real life into a virtual experience. The gear, sadly, needs to shrink.

The present gear is still not good enough to appeal to the masses. As I write this post someone hovered over my shoulder, and described HTC-Valve’s VR glasses as “a liver tumor”, which is a pretty accurate abstraction of what these oversized sensor goggles resemble to a human being.

Samsung’s VR goggles are a bit sleeker, yet still haunted by the cyborg look that baffles most people observing from the outside (you, on the other hand, are obliviously flying over the Amazon, or riding elephants in India).