Experimenting with VR

I just finished a short series of experimentations about virtual reality called VR Diary. Here’s a brief summary of why and how.

VR, but what for?

Creating content for virtual reality is easy. A-Frame is probably the easiest way to get started. It’s entirely free and open-source and only requires a basic of HTML programming. On other projects, I used Google VR SDK for Unity and the graphic UI of Unity allows you to create content without even typing a single line of code.

So now the real question is what are we going to use VR for? VR is just a medium and in itself has no value.

This is what I explored in this project. VR is an immersive and engaging platform so I decided to use it to share personal experiences with the readers.

It took a direction towards philosophical questioning and reality challenging that I hadn’t expected. But overall it’s been successful from a personal standpoint: the experiments are consistent (except maybe the first one) and I’ve been able to go through the 6 days.

Working as a hobby

An essential aspect to this experiment is being on holiday with a lot of free time. I dedicated about 2 or 3 hours a day actively working on the VR experiment and writing the post. The rest of the day was spent thinking passively about what to do next.

This liberty was essential to generate new ideas to experiment. Creative people know you can’t just sit at a desk and expect to get new ideas. That’s when you go out for a walk, sit in the grass, spend some time in a zoo or a museum that you release the most of your creative potential.

I thoroughly enjoy this lifestyle of working actively a few hours in the morning and passively for the rest of the day. Maybe that’s how life should be: dedicating most of your time to creativity and self-expression and work only for how long is necessary. This is something I want to explore more in the future.