---- Virtual Reality (VR) Best Things To Do For Free ----
Ok so if you are like me you were hyped for VR and all the glory it promised to bring for the future of interactivity in the technology space. If you were incredibly disappointed with the offerings when you actually got into the VR space then you were also like me. These findings led me to put together an article expressing what I found when looking for free VR content online. You can view these findings in the link below:
Free Virtual Reality Content is 90% porn 10% Everything Else
Now, beyond this rude awakening as to what the majority of free VR content entailed. There were some nuggets of golden truth I discovered while digging in the pit of my own despair. We will start with the basics and work out way to what I believe is the best value of emersion for time spent.
360 VR Pictures
There is a multitude of free 360 degree VR Images available online. Simply searching your favourite browser will bring them up. If you filter by highest quality you can experience many different places of the world right in your living room. If you pair the visuals with audio representations of the places found on Youtube it becomes a freeze frame simulation of what it is like to be there. For instance, pairing the following: beach pic with beach sounds, scuba whale pic with whale sounds, rainforest pic with rainforest sounds, Times Square pic with Times Square sounds, etc.
Random VR Videos
With the increasing availability of 360 degree cameras there are various people recording their experiences and posting them up to various places online such as YouTube, Dailymotion, etc. I simple search on your web browser will bring up these results and video quality can vary. Utilising the filter options on your browser can narrow results to what is appealing to you in regards to video duration, pixel count etc.
VR videos on YouTube
VR experience: Help
There are an increasing amount of VR experiences to be had on YouTube. Google Spotlight has good quality stories to experience for young and old, while the quality remains somewhat low due to some YouTube restrictions, it is some of the better free video content available.
Other avenues to find free VR video content are available, these can be of varying quality and may take some sifting through to find what you like in a decent output.
Gaming
Steam logo
Steam
Steam offers a growing number of gaming experiences for VR headsets. While the gaming experiences themselves tend to be simple in design and short for the moment, advances and experimentation with the technology is producing quite different gaming experiences. There are a number of free games and game demos listed on steam, while graphically appealing and as much of what can be called games in the current climate of VR gaming… for some this isn’t quite enough.
Free Steam VR Games
Free Game Poly Runner VR
Retro Gaming
The greatest experience I have had with VR to date is utilising the virtual desktop to create a screen which is slightly larger than the peripheral vision and playing first person shooter retro games such as Alien Trilogy, Doom, Quake etc. This method is considerably immersive and is a “full game” experience. Initially I thought the lower quality graphics would not play well with the VR etc., but surprisingly it holds up quite well. To be honest it has added a new dimension to these old games which has made them a completely different experience to play through. Anything which has a first person view can have some success in transferring to the VR medium. Not to say that a run on Mario or Sonic will look bad either, for these it just looks like it’s on a big screen which is great too. However, games with FPS view will put you closer to being there “in” the game. I will cover this experience separately in another article as it is quite an in depth experience to cover and would detract from the overall direction of this article.
Conclusion
Even though VR has been around for a while now it is still relatively new technology and advances continue to emerge as the industry matures and technology adapts to meet the capabilities and limitations of the hardware and software driving it forward. While the free experiences have been considerably limited they continue to expand with new additions being added daily. Even during the time I have owned a VR headset (July 2017) the availability of free content has roughly doubled in size, all be it at relatively low visual quality. However, there is fun to be had for free in the VR realm right now, you just have to dig a little deeper to find what it is you are looking for. This is a compilation of my experience in finding the best content available over the past four (4) months of owning a VR headset. Hopefully this article has helped direct you in finding the kind of content you would like to see played on your headset and increased the quality of your experience with VR.
What do you think of the free content available for VR headsets? Did I miss anything in my coverage of free VR content? Where do you go to find your free content? Feel free to leave a comment, share your thoughts or start a conversation.
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