Virtual reality for your smartphone
Fun and Entertainment
in times of Corona
The Corona crisis is forcing many to stay at home in their 4 walls and are thus torn from their ordinary everyday life. That's why it's all the more important to take care of your own psyche and counteract inner tension through fun and entertainment.
Unfortunately, since it is currently not possible to enjoy a VR Escape Room with us, we have thought of something for you to bring a bit of virtual reality to your home in a very cheap way.
Table of Contents:
What is smartphone VR?
Virtual reality on a mobile phone is completely different from what we offer at Virtual Escape . Our equipment consists of enormously powerful computers, which stream our VR escape room adventures directly to our high-end VR headsets such as the HTC VIVE PRO via a highly sensitive wireless process. The smartphone, on the other hand, acts both as a display and as a processor, i.e. computer, in a VR experience.
Therefore, an experience from our VR exit-the-room games is not the same experience as with a smartphone. Nevertheless, it is amazing how much is already possible with it and at a fraction of the price!
What are the advantages of smartphone VR?
The acquisition costs are extremely low
Easy to set up (here's how)
Only a holder and a smartphone are required
Countless free apps
Discover the world from home
Perfect for enjoying 3D and/or 360° movies
The Perfect VR Smartphone Apps
Although you won't be able to fully experience immersive VR now, you will be able to download a few different applications and access a wide variety of VR-related content on select devices.
Here is a selection of apps we have chosen:
youtube
Most of you will already have Youtube, but there are not only normal 2D videos there. There are many 360° videos available that can be viewed in all directions, in stereoscopic 3D.
This provides an immersive environment to enjoy a new way of video.
Within
Discover the best VR content from the world's leading VR designers - all in a single app.
From gripping stories set in pure fantasy worlds to documentaries that bring you closer to the news than ever before.
Within brings together premium, narrative_immersive content across a variety of genres.
VR Theater for Cardboard
Enjoy your own 2D and 3D movies in a virtual cinema for free (it also supports 360° and 180° panoramic movies). Full virtual reality: turn your head and observe the surroundings.
Works with all mp4 files, can play movies from the web and other applications.
Supports many 3D movie formats, but also plays regular 2D movies.
No ads, no in-app payments or stats collection: 100% free for personal use!
Carlsen Space VR
WINNER "EDUCATIONAL MEDIA PRIZE 2018"
Experience space with Virtual Reality!
Which is the largest planet? What is the name of this constellation? What does an astronaut explore? The universe is full of exciting information. This virtual reality app lets you explore breathtaking 360° views and see planets and stars up close in 3D. Look up, down or back and forth - wherever you turn, there is something to discover!
cool tour
With Cooltour you bring the most impressive Italian places to your home.
Cooltour uses new technologies in the field of 360° photography and VR to offer an immersive experience that will take you to some of the most fascinating places of Italian artistic and cultural heritage.
Continue...
Setting up the smartphone for VR
One of the key components when setting up virtual reality with a smartphone is the phone itself. There is of course a key question to ask:
Which phones are suitable for VR?
There's a good chance your phone already supports VR. Almost all smartphones do this today, across all operating systems. The best thing to do is to check the App Store or Playstore to see whether you the Google Cardboard app can be downloaded.
What makes virtual reality even more immersive is the ability to look around by moving your head.
This is possible with the help of a gyroscope sensor on the smartphone. Most mid to high-end smartphones support such a feature. If the current smartphone does not support this, then you should know that some VR applications can still be experienced. However, you cannot then look around in the game or in the application.
Tips:
Make sure the phone and screen size are compatible with the headset you have chosen. (Our headset fits max. 6.2 inches (15.75 cm))
Set your phone to Do Not Disturb
Setting up the smartphone headset
The first step to experiencing virtual reality on mobile is to ensure you have a working mobile virtual reality headset. Unfortunately, you won't be able to experience VR without it.
If you don't have a mobile VR headset, don't worry, we have a suitable one for you: the smartphone headset
How to adjust the headset for optimal comfort?
Our headset comes complete and ready to use.
At the beginning you have to open the flap at the front with the top button, where the smartphone is clamped (be careful with some buttons on the side of the device, but normally these shouldn't cause any problems). The loops should now be properly clamped, appropriate to the head size.
Then you can adjust the lens distance or the distance between the eyes (IPD) with two sliders at the top to make the experience even more pleasant.
How do I know it's set correctly?
When properly adjusted, what you see on the screen should appear clearer and less blurry than before. In order to properly test this, the VR content needs to be launched first.
Tips:
Make sure the phone and screen size are compatible with the headset you have chosen. (Our headset fits max. 6.2 inches (15.75 cm))
Set your phone to Do Not Disturb
What to pay attention to?
Maybe one day we will all be able to access all kinds of VR content from our mobile phones, but unfortunately the technology is not there yet.
Keep in mind that mobile VR will not offer the same experience as a PC headset.
Nevertheless, you can experience a lot of different content in virtual reality with your mobile phone.
For glasses wearers:
Our VR headsets at Virtual Escape offer the option of wearing glasses underneath. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case with smartphone VR headsets. We recommend using contact lenses.
Avoid motion sickness (nausea):
Motion sickness, as it's called in our industry, is the experience of getting sick in virtual reality. It actually mostly just depends on whether what you see corresponds to the actual movement in real reality or not. The more this is not the case, the worse you can get in VR.
In our Escape Room adventures at Virtual Escape, something like this can hardly or not happen at all, since the real movement coincides with what we see. How this works, we will soon publish an article in a blog.
In VR with a smartphone, however, this can happen much more easily. Roller coaster and roller coaster simulations in particular are strongly discouraged , as even VR veterans get very sick there and a wrong interpretation of a virtual reality experience arises.
Closing words
As you can see, there are many ways to experience virtual reality up close with your own smartphone.
However, this experience is just a tiny tidbit of what is possible today. However, you have to put at least €500 on the table to get something decent.
Or even better, come to Virtual Escape and try out one of the many VR Escape Rooms together as a team. Because this experience is even impossible to create at home!
Author: Marcel Stoeckl
Position: CMO & Co-Founder
Contact: salzburg@virtual-escape.at
Company:
Virtual Escape KG
Linzerbundesstrasse 33
5020 Salzburg
