Month: July 2021

A week with my Oculus

When Facebook announced Oculus Quest 2 last October I almost immediately visited their web site and put one in the shopping cart. But then I didn’t buy it.

£299 is a relatively affordable price, and it’s something I really wanted to try playing with in order to understand where this whole VR thing is going. I had tried headsets before, including when I visited Facebook HQ a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t really sure about the quality of the Quest 2: did it have enough resolution? Was it fast enough, considering that it’s a self contained device, without a beefed up PC to calculate triangles position in real time?

Then a colleague brought one to the office. I tried it on for 10 minutes. I went home and ordered one.

Here’s a few notes after about one week.

It’s pretty cool and well thought device, you can see that this is not a first generation product.

I had not realised that you could “see through” using the built in IR cameras. These cameras are for tracking, so no great quality, but the fact that you can poke your head out of the safe grid and see your room is one of the coolest features imho.

Watching VR content is interesting and different. There isn’t a huge amount of stuff, but for example visiting the White House with Obama was cool. Sitting in the Oval office and looking around is completely different than watching a documentary on a TV, however large it is.

Playing is fun. I bought a sniper game, joined the Italian resistance during WW2 and I have been shooting Nazis since. The fact that you can move your body to peek out of a hiding place is awesome.

I tried an app that allows me to create multiple huge virtual screens for my Mac. It works well and it’s pretty cool, but since I’m wearing the headset I can’t see my keyboard. While I can use the keyboard without watching most of the time, it turns out that I still need to peek at it every once in a while. It’s an interesting experiment but I don’t see myself really using this anytime soon.

I haven’t tried any collaboration tools yet. I think that not being able to write quickly in real time will not make using these virtual whiteboards very effective. I spent 5 minutes trying to put a sticky note on a wall… fun, but in a real meeting it would have been frustrating.

Overall it’s a pretty good toy, I’m happy I got it and I think I will mostly be using this for games and content.

Most likely Apple will introduce a version of this sometime soon, it will be 3 times more expensive, will run a version of iOS called vrOS, it will be much better and will take this whole industry mainstream.

Got a bunch of Nazis waiting for me, see you soon.

Figment

I’m in Seattle.

There’s an Illy coffee sign, a big red cube rotating on top of a pole at an intersection. I consider how Illy has become an international brand.

I’m in a diner. The person I’m with tells me a story about an asian restaurant with food so spicy that the owner gave him direction to the toilets, in case the food was too hot. But my friend hardly broke a sweat while eating it.

I’m about to tell him my usual story of how my tolerance for spicy food has increased over the years.

Then the 6:15am alarm goes off.

I wonder where this story came from. I mean, I know I imagined it, but it’s not as obvious as other times what memories triggered this fantasies. This didn’t look at all as the Seattle I remember, I don’t recall seeing the Illy cube sign, I literally don’t understand the food/toilet reference…

I now wonder how much of this story I actually dreamed, and how much of it I made up while trying to remember the dream for the last hour, and then writing it down, adding thin layers of details, turning fantasies into memories.

Oh well, time to get to work… unless I wake up.

Or you do.

My July 2021 routine

We go to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we work from home for the rest of the week. This is more or less the new routine.

Even when we go to the office, mostly I don’t use my desk, I sit in our conference room. After all the whole point is meeting other people. Basically my office desk is my dining table at home (the fact that I live across the street from the office makes this whole thing pretty easy to manage).

My office desk / dining table, early July, 2021..

We check ourselves on office days with the freely provided lateral flow tests (or at least I do). These are easy enough to use and at this point not too uncomfortable, especially once I learned how to perform the part of the test that comes after the swab while sneezing violently.

A little problem with this new routine is deliveries: I need to plan deliveries at home or at the office based on where I’m planning to be. Not too difficult with next day deliveries, but it can get tricky with “3 to 5 days” ones.

As of today I don’t think that we will ever go back to a full time office routine. Maybe it will increase to 3 days in / 2 days out. We’ll see.

Be good. Stay safe. Check the last episode of our podcast.