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Oculus Quest UX is built by and for engineers
Every few months when I pick up my Oculus Quest 2 and try it, I get annoyed by the obvious things that Meta, the social media giant that spent over $100B on VR/metaverse fails to get right. Currently, Oculus feels like a product that is made by engineers, for engineers, and used by engineers. Having a few ergonomic and user-experience designers in the team would have these sorted out. But it feels like Meta does not. And hence as a consumer using Oculus is frustrating. I really wish they get this right, I believed in the vision, paid $$$ and bought the product two years ago. But the onboarding to…
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My new Oculus Quest 2 VR
Recently I had purchased an Oculus Quest 2, a Virtual Reality Headset (VR wearable device) from Facebook. This review is my initial reactions after using it for a couple of hours. Disclosure: I write reviews about products that I have bought for my usage and paid in full. There were no sponsorship or advertisement or commission of any sort involved in this post. I have a Google Daydream VR that I connect with my Google Pixel 2 phone. I don’t play video games so the novelty of a VR wears off quickly. In the last two years, I have used it only for 4 or 5 times. The problem with…
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Doom (1993) Game: How First Person Perspective works?
It was 1994, I was studying my second year engineering in Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumpudur. Doom (1993), the first person shooter video game for PC had got released recently and took the world by storm – many of my friends got hooked on to the game. Playing the game, myself and my friend P.S.Ranganathan, got curious about how it worked, especially on how is the graphics engine powering it works? [Internet Archive has an online browser-based version of DOOM (Shareware Episode) and Wolfenstein available legally for free or from JS-DOS] Doing some studies through available resources and books – there was no public Internet access in India then,…
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XBOX Live – YouTube and OneDrive
Few months back Microsoft announced to make more services available free for XBOX Live users. This meant without paying for XBOX Live Gold subscription (around $10 per month) you can use popular apps like YouTube, Internet Explorer and OneDrive in your XBOX consoles. I have two XBOX 360’s in house, I swapped one my son was using (XBOX 360 Halo edition) which broke down today with another one (XBOX 360 White) which was lying around unused. While doing it, I formatted the XBOX HDD, downloaded his profile and added my profile as well. After I adding my profile I downloaded the apps – YouTube, Internet Explorer and OneDrive. All of…
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XBOX One launch craze
I am in Redmond this week, midnight today is the launch of Microsoft’s new gaming console Xbox One. I have heard of multi-day lines for buying new products from Apple, but this is the first time I am seeing one for a Microsoft product. I am seeing “Q” lines marked in Bellevue Square Mall in front of the Microsoft Store and in Best Buy, Bellevue where I see determined fans camping in tents in the parking slot. The technical specification and features of XBOX One are impressive, with two AMD Quad Core CPUs (for the first time a gaming console on x86 architecture showing how far it has come from…
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XBOX360 Kinect
When I first saw the Project Natal video (the code name of XBOX Kinect) nearly two years back, I was sure that this was yet another concept video from Microsoft and had little chance of coming out the way it was depicted. It was too futuristic. Even if they did release it, I was expecting it to be clumsy, too complicated to configure, and will only work for a single person – basically unviable for everyday use. In the first week of last month, I got an email from Microsoft India with some special offers for the Kinect launch in India. I was somehow caught by it and ended up…
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I was lucky at Microsoft Partner T20 event
For last two days, I am attending Microsoft India Partner Summit titled “T20” at Mumbai. Yesterday there was a written quiz on Microsoft Virtualization, I attempted just for fun. Generally, I am not lucky to win any prizes, but today was my day. In the morning they announced my name as one of the winners for XBOX 360, I was happy to collect it. On my way back to my room I was invited to a game show where they had questions on Windows Live/Vista/IE 8 and were giving prizes up to 10 Grams of Gold. I played and answered a simple question on Windows Live (being a Windows Live…
