VR/XR Audio

I dug my Oculus Quest 2 back out of the closet after Apple announced their Vision Pro headset. I had one of the original Oculus DK1 (Dev Kit 1) devices and never did much with it since you needed a pretty beefy PC rig at the time to really drive it.

Later on a friend convinced me to by a Quest 2. It was absurdly cheap in comparison. I think the DK1 cost me over $500 USD and did not have any sort of computing capability – it was just an external display for your gaming rig. The Quest I think was half that and it was a fully self-contained platform. I’d messed with Android Cardboard in the meantime but it’s super janky in comparison.

So now there is this ubiquitous platform from Meta that is pretty cheap when you think about it. What’s it useful for right now? I think it’s good enough for all sorts of things even though it gets panned for being not there yet. Pixelated, blah blah.

I’ve found that yeah it’s fatiguing over time, but then I remember my eyes bugging out so bad at the first LCD displays too. Before good viewing angles and IPS screens we had some pretty bad passive displays and terrible viewing angles. That situation doesn’t last long if there is enough market demand to keep driving the industry.

I’ve been messing with some sculpting/painting/CAD programs on the Quest and so far I think this stuff is useful. Now I’m wondering about music apps. I’m doubtful somehow that gestural music is going to work for me. I don’t really like theramins!

Jokes aside I’m going to check out a few things like Patch XR and Lyra VR.