PortalVR: XR Without a Headset
portalvr.ioWhy would you name a gaming adjacent system “PortalVR”? I doubt you’ll get in trouble for it but you’re going to confuse so many Portal fans (and there are a lot of them).
It's a pretty common word and the last real portal game was 14 years ago. I don't think it's that confusing.
And there's already a VR headset named Portal that's not confusing those fans.
Though uh that one has some potential for confusion.
Three years ago in a very real sense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_Desk_Job
I put "real" in my sentence explicitly to exclude these little control demos. Half an hour long, no portals, whatever sense it's a "very real" portal game is getting outvoted by the other senses.
Nope the last was released 9 years ago and it was ironically a VR-only game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/446750/Portal_Stories_VR/
That is at least officially a mod for portal 2, and also it's not by Valve. It doesn't count as a real portal game.
I was going to name it Portal, but I named it PortalVR to minimize confusion.
It’s called PortalVR because there is no better name to describe what it’s like to play VR this way. It is like playing games by looking through a portal you hold in your hand.
Yeah please don't change this based on the thoughts of just one Portal fan. If you like the name, keep it.
Portal is pretty old at this point. And realistically you can only expect to get dibs on a generic word for so long.
Sure it's just bizarre for me as a dedicated Portal fan. I just replayed Portal 2 a year ago so it's still fresh for me.
If they're truly attached to it they shouldn't change now of course.
To me this looks like a solution in search of a problem. And I can't imagine it's fun to hold out a tablet at the end of your arm for very long.
They spell out the problems on the page:
* If you are a VR dev, popping in and out of a headset dozens of times a day is a pain. * If you are in marketing, getting someone passing by to put on a headset is a challenge. * If you are a player, buying a headset without checking out the content first is risky.
All of this comes down to the fact that VR/XR is awesome if you commit to a full session that makes it worth strapping in. But, has been no middle ground that lets you just stick your nose in the door and check out what's up inside.
I saw a live demo of this at SVVR. You would definitely get gorilla arm if you tried to hold a tablet up high for a long contiguous duration. But, holding it casually, walking around with it down low, and looking through it in spurts is no problem.
YouTube VR and other platforms with VR can be viewed similarly so you don't need to have googles strapped to your face. It's not nearly as immersive, but you can at least look around in the VR environment and see things. Of course there were things like Google Cardboard as well to get over the hump of no goggles available. There's not really a viable AR use case, so I'd imaging things like this will keep popping up
I video it and demo it on a tablet since it helps make it clear how it works, but my preferred display device is a Galaxy Fold. Pockets great, and is a nice comfortable size when unfolded.
This would be pretty cool for a Descent clone, since the game is all about 6 degrees of freedom moving your tablet around to fly through a space would feel pretty natural.
Where this fails however is that it doesn’t seem to track the user’s face in order to properly render a parallax effect, so it does not really feel like a true portal.
I tried that and it made the gameplay worse since it harmed your ability to control the camera precisely with your hand. The goal of this is primarily to enable gameplay, and secondarily to deliver a portal effect.
Why doesn't the QR code take you to the official app. Or just provide links to them.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.portalvr.co...
That’s not the main app, that’s the controller app you install on a phone to use with the main app. The main app must be side loaded, because Google will not approve it in the Play store since it installs third party apps.