I spent an hour or so with the Samsung Gear VR headset. It’s just so damn cool. I watched “Man On Wire” for probably the 8th time. The Netflix VR app makes you think you are in an enormous house in a place that looks like Aspen. You look to the left and there are snowy mountains outside the floor to ceiling windows. To the right the wall is covered with beautiful paintings. The movie screen looks like it is over 100″. The lights in the room turn off or on in response to whether the movie is actually playing. Then you tkae off the headset and find yourself back in your dingy, relatively dismal apartment. I mean my apartment is perfectly deent. But it’s no palatial mansion in the Colorado mountains. These VR apps have a capacity for making you feel bad about your real life.
The user manual was perfunctory, except for one thing. I had to laugh when they felt it necessary to warn against wearing the headset while driving a car. I mean seriously, who would think to do that, and in what condition would they have to be to stick their head into a device which fully tranports them to another place and think: “This would be a great time to get behind the wheel.” You cannot see anything around you while wearing a VR headset. I had trouble reaching for a beverage on the table right in front of me. I cannot think of any rational circumstance where a sentient human being would think to put on a VR headet while driving a car.
If these headsets become relevant enough I could imagine them being fittable with prescription lenses, making it unnecessary for those of us who wear glasses to be encumbered by the handicap of the headset crushing our faces. Hah, just corrected a little typo: “crushing our feces.”
I am at Studio Square. I don’t go out inAstoria on weekends so much any more, but with the holiday weekend I figured the crowds would be manageable. And the TV here is utterly boss. But still, that damn VR headset makes this 200″ monster look almost rinky dink by comparison. Well, no it doesn’t. Just sayin’.
Evidently there is an ocean of porn out there for the Gear. I approach that stuff with curiosity and trepidation. I mean do I really want or need to be IMMERSED in an orgiastic gang bang? Maybe not but I am curious what the pornsters are doing with this stuff. Porn always leads the way with new technology platforms. I’ll never forget a time I started up CU-SeeMe at a time when there was hardly anybody using it. Most reflectors were empty. One night I found a reflector where 8 or 9 windows popped open. Each window was to stream live video from somewhere in the world. I was on dialup, and figured I would go to the kitchen for a few minutes while these video stream trickled through my 14.4 modem. I came back from the kitchen and found my computer screen filled with a wall of cocks. This CU-SeeMe reflector was a group jerkoff channel for dudes who evidently didn’t want to show their faces, only their rock hard junk. If I saw this today I would probably laugh but at the time I couldn’t get that shit off my screen fast enough. It reminded me of a story a friend from school often repeated. He said that when he was 13 or 14 his dad took him aside and said “Son, as you get older, you’re gonna find that groups of guys get together and masturbate. Don’t do that.” As a young teen he did not know what to make of this curious advice, but he tucked it away with other parental wisdom for later review. As an adult all he could think of this advice was to ask “Where the hell did you grow up, dad? What the hell kind of life?”
Hokay, it is too dark to see what I am typing, save for the sporadic bright light from the enormous television.
