Review of Oculus Dash and Oculus Rift Core 2.0
In 2017, I had the chance to be part of Oculus Connect — one of the largest VR conferences in the industry on which the Oculus team demonstrates their latest innovations in VR. Since October I have been waiting to try the Rift Core 2.0 and the new Oculus Dash interface. So, during the holidays, after meeting relatives and friends, I finally found time to test it thoroughly. In the beginning of 2018, I want to share initial impressions.
Oculus Dash
The new Dash UI is clean and futuristic, the interactions are well thought and enjoyable, although it is still in a Beta. The level of immersion achieved through sound and visual cues was impressive.
Main screen
Contrary to the Oculus Core 1.0, the screen in 2.0 feels more accessible, it is placed closer to the user and I could drag it even closer if needed. This is a great solution for users who wear glasses with large diopters and need to move the screen closer to be able to read the text.
My top feature was splitting the main screen into separate screens. I could enlarge/shrink them and move them around me. I am a huge proponent of this idea — all VR browser should adopt a similar functionality. It improves productivity by empowering the user to take maximum advantage of the 360 environments to optimize their work environment.
Last but not least, returning the panels in the original plane (where they become curved instead of flat) was very easy. I just moved the screen to the dotted area of their original place — the screen automatically stuck to it and oriented towards me. Thank you for this Oculus team! In a prototype, I wrote about in a previous blog post — VR website: News media prototype, we tried a similar concept with splitting screens and moving them around. Placing all of the panels in a single plane was impossible so I found it useful to be able to stick them to “a virtual wall”.
Menu stripe in Dash
The second feature that makes the Dash UI unique is the menu bar. It reminded me of the control deck of a spaceship. I loved how the buttons sunk down. Still, it was quite hard to understand when a button was pressed — they sank both on hover and when being pressed. In the beginning, I thought I’d pressed a button while I had to tap it a second time to activate it.
Also, every time I called the dash menu the stripe appeared behind me. It got tedious to constantly move it in front of me or make a few steps to go behind it.
Oculus Home 2.0
I loved the new Oculus home! Finally, Oculus stepped up their game by providing an interactive, customizable home environment. The view totally rocked it — I don’t want to spoil your experience so I will just say it reminded me a lot of Dorne from Game of Thrones. All in all, the home experience was so cool I hanged 1 hour in VR to redecorate my space.
A nice touch was how the object automatically stuck to a wall or the floor once I got it closer. This made placing objects much easier than expected. Unfortunately, learning how to delete an object took me quite a while, just a hint — throwing an object out of the terrace did not work — the object reappeared. It would have been cool to be able to remove a sofa by throwing it into the sea.
The most satisfying feature of the new Oculus home was traveling from my home scene to friend’s homes. The available “options” were displayed with glass spheres. I had to smash a sphere into the floor to move to another space. The interaction was designed brilliantly — fully resembling the breaking of real glass. Seriously, I enjoyed it so much I was smashing sphere after sphere.
The only thing that truly bothered me was how the Oculus team tried to hook me to spend more time in VR. Virtual Reality is more immersive than any other media and has the potential to be much more addictive. Companies leading the way should use ethical UX principles.
At some point during my redecoration, I got a notification that I won a prize — a “secret box” with items for my new home “just because I was hanging out in VR”. Opening a secret box affects the brain in the same way a slot machine does. The technique is well used in video and especially in mobile games to “increase user engagement”. However, it is proven that loot boxes as well as similar UX practices are harmful and lead to addiction. I understand that Oculus goal is for users to spend as much time in VR as possible but there is no need for dirty hooks — if the experience is worth, the users would gladly come back.
Have you tried the new Rift Core 2.0 and Dash interface? What do you think?
