Solving the Winter Blues with VR

Virtual reality has surprised me yet again. I remember the awe I felt the first time I stood over Hong Kong in Google Earth, and the latent dread of fighting monsters in Edge of Nowhere, but I never really experienced a feeling of true presence—a replacement of real reality. That is until a few nights ago, and it was an epiphany on VR’s power to help you relax and unwind.

To give you some background, I recently took a trip to Mexico, away from the snow and the cold. After a few weeks back, with dreary winter dragging on endlessly, I was seriously missing the sun and sand. So I figured I’d play with some environments in my Rift and ‘escape’ for a bit.

I flipped through some Steam VR environments and browsed some 360 3D photos, but I didn’t have that eureka moment until I fired up an app called Perfect that I had previously purchased and played with.

Source: Credit goes to ndreams

Perfect is an environment simulation built with the Unreal Engine that gives you three locations to explore with day and night options. They’ve got a few teleportation hotspots to move between and some minor interaction with rocks you can throw or logs you can put on a campfire. One location is a tropical beach, and thus my interest.

When I played with the app in the past, the rendering was nice and the interaction was ok, but it wasn’t very engrossing. I had explored in the daylight option, and while it looked pretty, it was not photorealistic. My interest didn’t last long.
This time however, when I flipped to the nighttime scene, it felt different. With less light the animation felt more realistic, and when I just sat back and let my thoughts drift with no motive of being entertained, it was almost lifelike. I spent five to ten minutes just sitting there, and I felt truly relaxed. When I took the headset off, my need to get away from the winter had been satisfied.

Now Perfect’s not perfect. I had to perform a fair amount of Jedi mind tricks to convince myself of the realness—this is the beach you’re looking for. And there’s obviously still the issue of resolution and screen dooring that will hold VR back until the next gen headsets and graphics cards. But the therapeutic effect left an impression on me, and I can’t say I’ve ever been more excited for a technology’s potential.