Tuscany

May 25th, 2013

I got the Tuscany demo up and running today. It was pretty simple. plug in the Oculus via hdmi & usb, turn it on, run the demo and voila, you're in.

Sound Woes
I can't get the sound to work. I'm running on an Alienware gaming laptop and when the HDMI cable is plugged in, sound is routed thru the cable. Since the cable goes into the Oculus to feed it video, I get no sound. I need to do more research on how to turn this off so the sound always comes from the headphone jack.

Evil Bits of Dust
My first challenge was not technical in nature. I needed to clean the screen. Since I bought the unit from ebay, it had been used and there were half a dozen dust particles on the screen. This doesn't sound like a big deal but when you have the goggles on, each bit of dust looked like a dead pixel and it really broke the illusion of the VR. I ended up using an air mattress pump combined with a glasses cleaning cloth to remove all the dust. So... heed their advice and be very careful to always keep the lenses on the headset and change it in a dust free environment

Nausea & Dizziness
People weren't kidding about dizziness from VR. You could feel it almost immediately. I knew not to push myself and I also bought ginger pills from GNC. I'm not sure if they helped but I didn't feel too bad after 3 sessions in Tuscany.

I felt a slight bit of dizziness every time my Avatar moved out of sync with my body. I am guessing the dizziness is cumulative so I avoided pushing myself too hard. If I ran forward too fast I felt it. If I turned the perspective without my head also moving I felt it.  Strangely enough, I did not feel this effect walking backwards. Standing still and looking around did not create any sense of disorientation either.

My solution to reducing dizziness was:
1. take a ginger pill
2. walk slowly
3. turn my head left/right when rotating the perspective left/right
4. avoid sprinting
5. walk backwards