Video Games

Though this sort of thing has me tempted to put together a proper VR capable PC:

Vehicle driving flying is an amazing experience in games that do it right. @Sumo should forget his disdain for haptics in this case, because you really gain from a controller that shakes as you drive fast over any kind of surface (or as your spacecraft is entering a planet's atmosphere).

I'm playing No Man's Sky at the moment, which only added VR in a patch but unusually for a game that didn't start with VR they integrated it really well. There are all kinds of vehicles in it - buggies with balloon tyres, monster trucks, submarines, various kinds of spacecraft - but even just the VR experience of getting in and out of them is great. Climb in and the canopy closes over you with a clunk. To get out, you physically lean over to grab a handle and pull the canopy open again. I only just got to the stage of building my own land vehicles (slightly oddly, the game's narrative means the first vehicle you acquire is a small spaceship). Driving the balloon tyre buggy (in which your visibility is restricted by the crash webbing) at speed over hilly terrain is awesome. The monster truck has a big blind spot, so when I drove it to the edge of a sharp incline and couldn't see if it was safe to drive on, I stood up, leaned forwards and looked down through the forward-sloping windscreen. These kinds of experiences work even if you can't afford to splash out on the high performance hardware. When I fly a craft close to the ground and trigger the landing sequence, the nose goes up, the craft then descends quickly and the immersion is so convincing that I get butterflies in my ears and stomach even though nothing is happening to my body.

Of course, if you're prone to motion sickness, any game like that is going to be a vomit comet. Somebody even created a mod to remove the nose-going-up thing from landing, for this reason.

No Man's Sky doesn't require (or support) actual driving wheels, flight sticks or HOTAS/throttle combos, so you use the VR controllers to grab virtual controls and rely on the haptic feedback - works if you can mentally adapt, terrible for those who can't find the right mental model. But there's some good games out there where you're expected to combine a VR headset with regular driving/flight hardware. At some point, I'm going to have to get some flight gear and try Star Wars: Squadrons. Tie Fighter was one of the best games I ever played and the VR equivalent has to be on my bucket list.

@skydancer

Not thinking of any VR set up but intersted in seeing developments in the area, and user experience too. So., keep posting on this thread please

Well, OK. Will still be prepared to create another thread because..

Couldn't give a fuck about VR it's basically thrown at you with a controller anyway.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, I just created the thread anyway.