Virtual & Augmented Reality

Flying scares me, irrationally so. I'm the kind of person to jump at every little bump and shake from a plane. So I decided to bring my Quest 3 along and see how it changed things.

It was SUCH a gamechanger.

Yesterday I flew from the US to South America and brought my Quest 3 + Kiwi battery headstrap. I carried it in a soft cloth bag with a microfiber cloth covering the lenses and tucked the whole thing into my backpack, I carried the remotes in the large pockets of my cargo pants. I used the newest airpods pro with sound cancellation, too.

Before my flight, I turned on battery saver mode and travel mode as I'd heard horror stories of people chasing down their menu windows as the plane took off. I got some curious looks from people, but that was to be expected.

I was seated in an emergency row so I didn't have a chance to test out how it looked during takeoff. I was curious to see how the gyro motion looked during that, Bummer!

But once we were in the air and I could put it on? wooooowwww. I pre-loaded a few movies onto my device using Sidequest and booted them up in Skybox. Usually when I would watch movies on my phone while flying, I found it hard to ignore the surrounding border of everything going on in the plane and it would make me nervous.

Not this time. Watching Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" in an IMAX theatre with sound-cancelling headphones felt amazing. There were so many moments where I forgot I was even flying. There was a bit of turbulence and honestly it just made the movie theatre setting shake only a tiny bit, felt like a tiny earthquake but it wasnt distracting enough to take away from the movie.

Throughout the flight, I would occasionally turn on pass-through to see if the beverage/snack cart was passing through and when it came to be I just paused my movie and removed the headset to enjoy an in-flight snack.

At the end of the flight my face did feel a tiny bit sore but that feeling passed after 20 minutes, nothing crazy.

If you're curious about taking yours on a flight, definitely do so!! It was such a kickass experience, really helped quell my flying anxiety, too.

There are a ton of games being adapted for vr, such at Satisfactory which just released an alpha for vr. The trend is only going to continue as more and more games convert from flat to vr. What games would you want to see adapted?