META Meta Platforms Inc

By Geoffrey A. Fowler 

Virtual reality is ready for Christmas-morning reality.

Buzz about VR has been building for years, but you can't stay up all Christmas Eve waiting to rip open a box of hype. Now a Star Trekkish gadget from Samsung and Oculus called the Gear VR makes a compelling VR experience available under your tree for just $100.

The Gear VR is the first 360-degree entertainment system that feels accessible and slick, rather than awkward and sickening. If you've only tried freebie VR experiences like Google Cardboard, it's worth giving it a second shot with this.

Gear VR reminds me of the Atari 2600, that affordable game console that brought Pac-Man home. Right out of the box, Gear VR makes it easy to access a surprisingly wide universe of games, videos, journalism and even immersive theater experiences, all curated by VR pioneer Oculus. And without the need for jumbo-sized headsets and price tags, Samsung's new hardware addresses much of what made earlier VR headgear uncomfortable.

There are some constraints. To use Gear VR, you will need one of this year's compatible Samsung smartphones, like the Galaxy S6 or Note 5. The phone mounts on the high-tech ski goggles to transform, like Voltron, into a VR machine that pumps images straight into your eyes.

You won't mistake what you see in there for reality--you can clearly make out pixels, like when you'd sit too close to an old tube TV. Yet using the Gear VR for a week, I frequently found myself getting wrapped up in its virtual worlds, for longer and longer stretches.

That's thanks, in part, to great strides from Samsung and Oculus in combating the urge to hurl. The nausea, which has made VR largely disappointing to date, is caused by herky-jerky scenery that doesn't match what your brain is expecting. Inside the headset, you're bounding this way and that, but your inner ear and your eyes are reporting different things.

But unlike other phone-goggle contraptions, the Gear VR headset has its own motion sensors, so it does a much better job of tracking your head movements when you're turning or looking up. And it pushes the Samsung phone's processor to cut motion delay to under 20 milliseconds, reducing the nausea-inducing blur. (My test Galaxy S6 Edge Plus worked so hard when mounted, it could blow through its huge battery with an hour or two of intensive VR.)

Other improvements also make Gear VR much more comfortable: The headset itself is less heavy--slimmed 19% from an experimental headset Samsung debuted last year. You can comfortably fit glasses inside, and there's also a focus adjustment that makes the view more pleasurable for aging eyes.

Yet there's still some discomfort. Wearing anything on your face for an hour can get old. Also, I occasionally encountered what appeared to be a flicker in the brightest parts of the screen. (Samsung says that's rare, and has to do with the way my brain processes the screen refresh itself.)

The fact that using this can result in fatigue is a testament to how much you can actually do inside a Gear VR. My biggest surprise was how much real content there is now--well over 100 apps in the Oculus store, with 40 coming in the next few months. After a week using it, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. You can watch LeBron James practice, tour the world's beaches, even watch Netflix on a TV in a ski chalet. Not all of this content is unique to the Gear VR, but the Oculus interface you use to browse and buy it makes it easy.

There are lots of enhanced shoot-em-up games, as you'd expect, but there are also experiences that are exclusive to VR. In "Land's End," for example, you float through a beach landscape to unlock puzzles. It's the most Zen virtual experience I've ever had.

Directors are also figuring out how to use 360-degree video for a theater-like experience. My favorite, from an app called VRSE, lets you visit the set of "Saturday Night Live" during its 40th anniversary special. You can spin around to watch Jerry Seinfeld's monologue and the celebrity reactions. (Don't miss Sarah Palin in the audience.)

Oculus also works to keep you away from bad experiences, vetting what goes into its store. On top of that, it adds a "comfort" rating to each app, like a Yelp for queasiness.

Rival phone VR headsets lose their immersive quality because they don't have good ways to let us select, view menus and do things other than look around. The Gear VR adds a touchpad on the right side that's equally useful for scrolling through movie titles and zapping alien spaceships, though it takes a little getting used to.

If you buy a Gear VR, there's one necessary piece of equipment that doesn't come included: A chair that can spin 360 degrees. If you don't have one at home, you'll miss out on a lot of what's going on, or just keep accidentally racking your shins on the coffee table.

The Gear VR is a no-brainer if you already have one of this year's compatible Samsung phones. If you're an iPhone owner and don't want to switch, you can get close to the comfort of Gear VR with a VR One headset from Carl Zeiss. But you're on your own for curating and downloading compatible apps.

There are a lot of reasons to be excited about this new virtual world, but it's important to understand what the Gear VR can't do. Limited by a phone's processing power, storage and screen, it can't play complex games. You can wear wireless headphones, but it isn't a surround-sound experience. Those are the kinds of experiences we can expect from Oculus's own Rift hardware when it debuts sometime next year.

And even the most impressive VR content is a work in progress. Max Cohen, Oculus's vice president of mobile, told me he thinks of the Gear VR less like an Atari, and more like the first game consoles, from the early 1990s, that were capable of 3-D graphics. In those days, game makers didn't know how far off in the distance to draw objects, or what a first-person experience should be like.

Today, VR content makers are learning what kinds of immersive experiences feel right, like moving in straight lines instead of up and down. "We are still figuring out the medium," Mr. Cohen told me.

Based on what I've already seen with Gear VR, though, I'm ready to strap in for the ride.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 20, 2015 09:18 ET (14:18 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.