I recently cadged a Google Daydream VR rig off of someone on Freecycle. The Daydream is a mass-manufactured headset that Google produced for people who thought that building their own out of cardboard was too ratchet for words. It doesn't really fit me in the same way that swim goggles never really fit me, but I stuck some safety pins in the head strap and you're not meant to move around too much while using it anyway, so it more or less works.
The Daydream can be best described as the world's okayest implementation of VR. It's main selling point is its rock-bottom cost, which was achieved by using your extant smartphone for both the display and the head tracking, the two most expensive modules in fancier rigs by Oculus or Vive. It's not a bad idea. We all carry around tiny high-resolution pocket supercomputers that can track our position well enough to catch imaginary Pokémon in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot, why not use it for this? The picture is not as potato-quality as one would expect. I would bump it up to at least "rutabaga". I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S10e -- coincidentally, a strong contender for "world's okayest smartphone" -- and while the dot pitch was definitely not set on the assumption that I would be staring at it from two inches away, it works out to each eye getting something between 720p and 1080p in terms of actual pixels. The display on this one is locked to a 30Hz refresh, but the head tracking is a solid 120Hz. I would assume it would look even nicer if I were using something like an Galaxy S23, but I don't have enough pawnable internal organs to get my hands on one of those.
The smartphone thing is also the Daydream's biggest downfall. Apparently nobody liked having to stick their smartphone into a thing and then, like, leave it there, out of reach of their hot little hands. It's not so much that we're all addicted to our phones -- although we are all definitely addicted to our phones -- as the fact that all of the interfaces on your smartphone were designed to be used by smashing your grubby little fingers all over the screen, which you cannot get to while it's in the headset. The Daydream comes with a little remote control, but that remote only works within the Daydream app. If anything goes wrong while you're trying to enjoy your VR experience, you have to take the headset off, unlatch the little door, take your phone out, fix whatever it's whining about, wipe off all the fingerprints, put the phone back into the headset, latch it in, and hang the thing back on your face. Once it works, it works, but while you're troubleshooting things it's a gigantic pain in the ass.
Right now the biggest obstacle I'm running into is the software. I would love to tell you what the bespoke Daydream app interface is like, but I have no idea, because none of it will install. The API apparently has a hard-coded list of phones it's willing to be friends with, which my phone is exactly one model too new to be on. The remote works and my phone can see it just fine, but it flat refuses to pair with it because I'm not running the Daydream app. There evidently exist apps that provide a VR interface for common portals like YouTube, but again, none of them will install, because they all ask Daydream what to do and Daydream just crosses its arms and goes 'nope, never met her'.
The Google Cardboard API, on the other hand, is pleasantly agnostic. "Is this a phone? Does it have a screen? Great. strap this sucker on and LET'S GOOOOOOOOO" The Daydream is really just a far more upscale version of a Cardboard headset, and uses the same physical screen layout. The Cardboard app installed just fine from the Play Store. So did Cardboard Theater, a cute little media viewer with a VLC-like propensity to dumb-stream anything in a Matryoshka container whether it knows the correct aspect ratio or not. I cannot get it to pull video live from YouTube or Twitch or whatever, but it'll show pretty much anything I dump on the SD card on a "screen" in the usual VR void.
YouTube itself will not use the void-theater format for regular videos, but if you pull up a VR-recorded video on the mobile app, the Settings gear up in the corner will sprout the option to "Watch in VR" under Advanced. I'm not crazy about the panoply of roller coasters people like to record in 3D, but there are a handful of letsplayers who stream from a PSVR or SteamVR setup.
In theory, SteamVR works, via the iVRy drivers in the App Store. The actual Steam sphere environment, with the controls etc, works just fine. (The Daydream remote, as mentioned, is useless, but it turns out my phone gets on just fine with the DualShock 4. The touchpad in the center of the controller maps to the phone screen. Some of the other buttons also seem to have consistent mappings, but I can't quite work out what function the phone thinks they're triggering -- it's a bit context-dependent.) Trying to bring up the tutorial room, however, makes everything strobe unusably. The googles suggest this is a fairly common issue and there is a way to resolve it, I'm just too lazy to do it right now. I don't have any VR games on Steam at present, so I'm not really in a hurry to solve it.
My brain copes surprisingly well with VR. The thing about current VR tech is that it's employing only one of the two major cues our brains use to estimate how far away things are. It's doing the same basic thing that the 3DS does when you turn the 3D mode on -- it's showing the left eye and the right eye slightly different views of the environment, which your brain interprets as parallax. This is generally enough to make things seem to be positioned in 3D space, but in real life, you also have a proprioceptive sense of how your eye muscles are moving to focus on objects at different distances. If you've ever suddenly walked into shit and had trouble with stairs for a few days after getting your glasses prescription updated, that's why: The new lenses change the focal distance of things ever so slightly, and your brain suddenly has to update its idea of how hard it has to work to see things that are X feet in front of you.
Current VR tech does nothing about this. In theory, you could; you'd need sensors to detect eye movement and minute changes in corneal curvature, as well as a complex system of lenses in the headset to dynamically adjust the apparent focal distance between your eye and the rendered object. It would be incredibly expensive and picky, and nobody is going to do that. It took us long enough to invent Portrait Mode on the iPhone, and that's just using Gaussian blur to pretend to do the thing I just described. Parallax effects are computationally much cheaper, to the point where the Virtual Boy did it, albeit in monochrome, in 1995.
This conflict between apparent parallax and everything being at the same focal distance (i.e., the surface of the screen) is what makes VR-world seem so unreal. I'm prone to carsickness on long rides, but movement in VR doesn't seem to bother me at all. Not real, nothing to worry about! Nor am I disconcerted by looking down and seeing environment (or void, or a control panel) where my body should be. I'm rubbish at knowing where my body is without staring at either myself or a mirror the whole time anyhow. I was the bane of dance teachers as a kid. Glancing down and not seeing my hand where my brain blind-estimated its position is pretty normal. It's a little disorienting when I run into a LPer who seems to have handed their Vive over to be operated by a dashboard hula doll, but that's about it.
The VR theater void is also an unexpectedly pleasant place to hang out during a migraine, insofar as such a thing exists. I don't necessarily have problems with light and sound per se; the issue is more ambient light and environmental noise, which comes in from all directions with uncontrolled duration and volume levels. In fact, usually what I do is black out the room and put something stupid on YouTube with the screen brightness and volume down low, because that's a very controllable amount of input that gives me something to pay attention to other than how much my head fucking hurts. Mother Nature has been throwing a tantrum the past couple of weeks, and one day combined a temperature drop of 20 degrees over 12 hours with sudden rain. I spent four hours debating whether or not I could make it to class that evening before deciding that if I had to have a four-hour internal debate over it, the answer was almost certainly no. I laid in bed watching random documentaries in the VR void with earbuds in until I had to get up to feed rats.
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