Why use Virtual Reality (VR)? Why not just use a laptop or tablet or just print out pictures to view images?
Several reasons:
Better overall viewing experience. The images are huge (one can walk up to it) and one can generally see much greater detail in VR than holding a laptop/tablet/photo up close.
Visual distractions are minimized. Even when one looking at a computer screen, one is still seeing ambient light, colors, and objects in the immediate surrounding. By using a VR headset, those issues are not present - 100% of one's attention can be to the scene in front of you.
Many computers have a start-up time and a seemingly constant barrage of updates. Both the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest VR headset are based on an optimized version of the Android operating system. One can turn it on and jump into VR in less than 30 seconds.
Several (including ours) VR experiences are built using a video game engine. We are proud to use Epic Game's Unreal Engine software. That means we can deliver a quality experience and leverage the features of a mature and well-developed game engine.
Why not just build a physical scrapbook?
Great question! The challenge is quality and quantity. How many scrapbooks can a person build at a time? While there are scrapbooking services, our offering can be a huge value-add at the end of a digital scrapbooking process. We could take the final media (pictures, sounds, videos) from a company like Legacybox or a local Colorado company like MemoryWise and create a VR experience. Once built, we can upload onto VR headsets. Like at a significant event, you could have several headsets to show people whereas with a scrapbook, there is usually only one or a small number of them for people to view.
I've never used VR before. Is this for me?
Via the controller(s) that come with the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest, we use a teleport mechanism to move around inside of the experience. This can decrease or completely eliminate the issue of motion sickness. But yes, there are caveats. While our experience is fairly sedate (no fast movements, horizon is always stationary, etc.), people have told us that the experience did activate some of the motion sickness symptoms for them, particularly on the Oculus Go. This comes from the fact that visually it looks like you are moving around inside but your inner ear tells you that your body is not physically moving.
However, while this can be true on the Oculus Go, it is not on the Oculus Quest. This is due to the ‘Go being a 3 Degrees of Freedom (3DOF) and the ‘Quest is a Six Degrees of Freedom (6DOF) headset. The ‘Quest is recommended for the best and most intuitive sense of immersion as it can detect slight movement of one’s body so the visual scene feels more natural as compared to the real world.