Oculus Quest 2 - despite the whole Facebook thing, coupling it with awesome games and experiences, it saved me from going mental during the autumn-winter-spring lockdown in Europe combined with the depressing weather of that time. Worth its weight in gold for that.
Roborock Robovac - also worth its weight in gold since the whole lockdown WFH turned my apartment into a permanent office, kitchen, cinema and gym, the floors would get gross fast, full of dust, lint, hair, dead skin flakes, food crumbs and felt nasty rolling on it to do exercises in the morning.
Would have loved to get a new laptop/PC to replace my aging banger, but not in this market.
+1 to the Quest 2. Despite Facebook, it's an incredible piece of hardware. We bought them for everyone in my distributed startup and the 8 of us hang out in VR together every week.
Virtual Desktop + Shadow PC on the Quest 2 is incredible. I played through Half-Life Alyx rendered on my cloud Shadow PC entirely wirelessly. It was a super smooth and responsive experience -- I didn't expect it to work at all when I first set it up.
Wow, interesting suggestion with Shadow PC.
How does it work exactly?
Do you install Virtual Desktop on the shadow pc instance? Do I need any "interim" physical computer on my home network to proxy?
Yeah you install Virtual Desktop on the Shadow PC and then your Quest can connect directly to it.
You do need something other than the Quest to start up the Shadow PC and keep it running (it will shut down automatically if an official Shadow client is not connected for too long). I use my laptop or AppleTV for this -- both connected over ethernet so I save all my WiFi bandwidth for the Quest.
We've tried a handful of things: Rec Room, Population One, Spatial, Echo VR, Beat Saber, Bigscreen, and Immersed.
The last few weeks we've been playing Population One together since they have a very simple 6-digit-room-code way of creating private lobbies that can support > 8 people. They also have great team/voice configuration settings where you can set up who can talk to who. I worry a little about gun games and inclusivity, but it's the only app that's consistently allowed the 8 of us to get together without spending 30 minutes troubleshooting. Probably this is in part because they just avoid the quirks of the Quest party system altogether and use their own private lobby system.
Echo VR's private lobby system never worked for us (we were only able to get 2-3 people in the same private lobby at the same time).
Rec Room is nice and easy for new VR people, but when we've gone into the minigames it seems to split us up into different teams, with different team chats, and we can't talk to eachother anymore. We also couldn't figure out if it's possible to make private games. But this is one I'd like to investigate more.
Beat Saber works pretty well but maxes out at 5 people.
Spatial works well for meetings, but if you're just looking to hang out it gets kinda boring.
Immersed is super cool for coworking, but I think it costs monthly money if you want to cowork IIRC.
Thanks for these recommendations/descriptions/reviews.
>I worry a little about gun games and inclusivity, but it's the only app that's consistently allowed the 8 of us to get together without spending 30 minutes troubleshooting.
Interesting pivot/fork for them - spin out a vr-group-chat service. 'Population 8'? ha
Getting an Oculus Quest 2 jumpstarted my workout regime after my gym closed during lockdown. I look forward to my workout time so much now. I got a $15 off brand silicon face cover to replace the cloth one to help with the sweat.
The only criticism I have of Beat Saber fitness-wise is that it doesn't train many muscles. It's mostly the shoulders, arms and a bit the wrists. Some songs train your core but you can't rely on that. It's awesome for rythm and reaction speed, however, so it's a good mental training too.
The sweat is a problem. The silicone masks are great (I use the VRCover ones -- https://vrcover.com/ -- Oculus sent me a pair because I had skin problems with the foam one), but they do not let my head breathe at all so I sweat even more. They're definitely less gross, though.
I personally started out with Supernatural, which is "Designed" for fitness and has classes with real instructors, but have since moved over to beat saber. They're similar, but whereas Supernatural still "feels" like a workout thanks to the coaches and stretching routines, beat saber just feels like a game but I still break a sweat.
I've played a lot Beat Saber, and ended up getting wrist weights. Very recently I've been spending time in Thrill of the Fight. I would never have expected myself to like it, but it's a fun workout.
I feel like I'd love the Quest 2 for a month or two and then I wouldn't use it after the novelty wore off.
Are there any AR/XR applications for Quest? It'd be pretty interesting if I got multiple for the fam and we could all be in the same environment somehow. Even if I needed room reference / locator devices it would probably be worth it.
Pistol Whip and Crisis Vrigade are fun shooters that get you moving. Crisis VRigade in particular will have you do LOTS of squats, it's also hard as hell (I've played for hours and still haven't beaten the first 6 minute level on easy difficulty).
For a less physical game, I'm really enjoying Control Tower VR. If you remember when early touch screen games started coming out, there was a whole genre where you used the touch screen to fly planes around and safely land them at an airport without crashing into each other. Control Tower VR is like that, but in 3D. It isn't super polished, but the gameplay loop is fun enough that I don't mind.
If you're tethering to a computer or using something like Virtual Desktop, Half Life: Alyx and American Truck Simulator are both fun a lot of fun. ATS is great if you just want to put on a podcast and zone out, without having to worry about crashing your real car when you zone out too much.
Also seconding the recommendations here for Superhot. That's the game that convinced me that VR was the real deal.
If you like Poker, I'd recommend Pokerstars VR. It's all fake money, so generally everyone's there to have a great time and it's fun to chat with the other players. I tend to play at around 11 PM to 2 AM Pacific Time, so I often find myself chatting with Australians, New Zealanders, and Europeans.
Population: One is pretty great if you like online multiplayer. Superhot is an obvious classic, lots of replayability and one of the first things I put people new to VR into. I've heard great things about the Walking Dead game but haven't played it yet.
Roborock Robovac - also worth its weight in gold since the whole lockdown WFH turned my apartment into a permanent office, kitchen, cinema and gym, the floors would get gross fast, full of dust, lint, hair, dead skin flakes, food crumbs and felt nasty rolling on it to do exercises in the morning.
Would have loved to get a new laptop/PC to replace my aging banger, but not in this market.