VR experience review : ‘Microflat in Hong Kong’ by Bloomberg.

I tried this journalistic VR experience by bloomberg on YouTube.

As I put the glasses on, I felt that I’m in a very cramped place, which is probably an attribute of the place itself. I think VR makes it feel more cramped than it actually is.

The video was streaming on YouTube on 1080p,and the quality was good enough for me not to bother about it. It did feel a little blurred, but that’s going to remain a problem with VR for some time to come.

The video had the effect of immersion on me, so I did forget about the outside world for a while.

The person who was hosting this video was very close to my eyes, and that felt a bit uncomfortable.

There were some tags attached to different things shown in the video, probably to things they wanted to highlight. I would have missed the items as well as the tags if I had not paused to look. It would have been great if the tags were in my cone of vision and guided me to what I wanted to see.

The host was going from one side of the view to another, making me move around. It was a bit uncomfortable to keep rotating 360 degrees. Camera cuts in which the host disappeared from view and appeared on the other side were confusing.

But wait.. Why was I looking at the host? Probably because the host was saying.. ‘see this, see that’. That was the nature of this video. I guess it could also be designed for ‘ambient viewing’ where you are not supposed to look at a specific place at a specific time. I think VR has that affordance.