Not to suddenly become an animal blog, but I just felt like posting about the adorable and equally bitey creature that has now entered my family and I’s life.

Her name is Summer, she’s a Retriever, and we’ve had her for a few weeks now.

She likes to bite my feet and clothes and sleeps a lot, when she’s not terrorising me.

But now onto other things; my brother managed to obtain an Oculus Quest. Being the curious lunatic that I am, I decided to see if I could get the Oculus Link stuff working and then maybe think about playing some VR games (Mostly Half-Life Alyx, I really want to play that).

While the Oculus software was setting up on PC, I cleared out a space in my room to do VR in. Using the Quest side of things, I set my playspace and ended up within my brother’s home screen.

I’ve goofed around with mobile VR before and I had a very mixed time with it. The lack of tracking often left me with motion sickness. But this; a significant improvement, a near generational leap by comparison. The sense of presence I felt within the Quest was a night & day difference to the pure headtracking on mobile VR/cardboard.

First thing I played on it was SUPERHOT VR. I’ve played the PC version before and thoroughly enjoyed that version. The VR version on the other hand was a bit too limited, especially in the small playspace that I had. I more or less couldn’t move either within the environment or in real life. Basically doing that arm rolling dance move that you might find in a typical 70s disco scene just to get the game to actually progress time. Not great.

During my playtime with that, the PC software finished installing and I prepared to begin the operation of Oculus Link. Which proved to be exceedingly difficult.

At first, it didn’t play ball with my front USB 3.0 ports; kept saying they were USB 2.0. Then I moved it to a 3.1 port on the back of my PC. It worked for a brief moment, but then disconnected.

Following that, I restarted my PC and then tried again. Mercifully, it worked and I managed to give Rez Infinite a go with VR on. And it sure is Rez. A oversaturation of images and sound with a banger of the soundtrack attached.

We tried to give Tabletop Simulator a go, but then my brother accidently quitted out of the Link side of things, which just led to more disconnection errors and an inability to reconnect. I eventually gave up and called it a day.

Which brings us to today, where I tried again. I started by power cycling the Quest. My brother never turns the thing off properly (Leaves it in standby), so I figured emptying out the memory might help. The computer was already refreshed from yesterday. This time, the whole thing worked flawlessly.

I goofed around in SteamVR, placing items around my virtual room. My favourite part being a two monitor PC setup, with a toilet as the chair. Fun stuff.

Games wise, I gave “War Remains: Dan Carlin Presents an Immersive Memory” a shot. It’s a very short VR experience that I decided to try out as I’m a fan of Hardcore History. I’ll talk more about in the upcoming Den post.

Now that I’ve gotten it working, I’m a bit more impressed with the current state of VR. I just wish I had more to do with it. I hope there’s a sale of Half-Life Alyx soon.

-Adam