i'm definitely a fan of good vr experiences and i'm sure there are quite
a few of you out there that feel the same but the investment required to get a
good vr experience can be pretty big
it's definitely a barrier of entry for a lot of people who'd like to get into vr
so when lenovo reached out about doing a sponsored showcase of their mirage solo
daydream vr headset and their mirage camera i was intrigued it's got two
cameras on the front here and this is something that we've seen before in
Windows mixed reality headsets but
it's also completely self-contained with
no wires or separate pc required
so let's take a look
it's not actually on yet we're just gonna roll the animated intro for now
let's put the camera aside for now and start off with the mirage solo headset
this is the world's first stand-alone
daydream head-mounted display in the past all daydream headsets were
essentially a shell with lenses that you could slide your daydream compatible
phone into side note here google only actually
lists 10 phones as daydream compatible on their website three of which are
pixel devices so if you want to go that route make sure you double check that
list with the mirage headset none of that matters it has its own built-in
computer phone thing to do all of the rendering so
standalone means there's no trip hazard wires all over the place and no external
sensors that you have to drill into your wall or mount to your desk or whatever
and as a side bonus you won't drain the battery of your actual phone like you
would with a google cardboard you know in case your mom calls or whatever
the exterior is made of like a soft touch off-white plastic with padding
here here and here and then it's got this dual action adjustability with the
button on the bottom and the knob at the back to accommodate pretty much
any size of noggin look at that i o and specs are about
what you'd expect for a modern computer phone
a modern thing with a usb type-c port on the side for charging 64 gigs of
internal storage and microsd expansion of up to 256 gigs the other side then
features a power button with status led and volume controls and a headphone jack
it also comes with a little daydream remote oh there it is
that while fairly simple indesign works pretty well for the types of games that
you'll be playing on a device like this which i guess means it's time to get
started i'm gonna fire up some blade runner here so most of that seems pretty
normal so far for a vr headset so while
Jake's getting blade runner fired up i want to talk you guys through what's
really different here the front is where things get really
interesting sorry here you go so the mirage's dual 13 megapixel
front-facing cameras power some new tech from google called world sense
so in combination with the usual internal inertial sensors like a
gyroscope and a magnetometer magnetic meter magnetometer magnet is that right
and a magnetometer these cameras allow
for six degrees of freedom of movement
that means the headset not only tracks your head but also walking
dodging leaning whatever you can pretty much move
however you want and information collected from the cameras should allow
the headset to keep track of where you are because even the best gyroscope is
going to be subject to some degree of drift now if you do
obstruct the view of the cameras or the room is too dark worldsense will
automatically fall back to tracking just your head then once the camera's
vision improves it resumes full spatial tracking and can even remember where you
were it's pretty darn cool
do you have a setup yet uh i know how to do that i am
the world's biggest professional of all time
we have accomplished more than any other
media group hey i'm happy for you all right
uh you could try the eclipse game what
do i do uh i don't you should probably stand up i feel like this is definitely
a better game to be standing up uh sure okay
you want to reset your view i mean it's definitely still powered by
phone graphics like i don't want to set unrealistic expectations for people
and the tracking the tracking is what impresses me
compared to other phone based vr solutions that i've tried before
so this one's pretty cool and a couple of the other games that kind of stood
out over the last week or so are fire escape and then blade runner
revelations depending on whether you're more into
puzzle solving action or or story
now with that said if educational content is more your jam the bbc
actually created an incredible underwater exploration of the california
coast and google has a tech demo that they're calling audio factory now it's
mostly just a showcase for simulated spatial sound
but it's also a good bit of fun especially since it's free
also for the non-gamers youtube vr can be a great reason to try out vr i mean
everyone knows i think already that you can watch regular videos like LTT
like they're on a big screen but there's also thousands of existing vr 180 and vr
360 videos on the platform and next vr even lets you watch nba league pass
games courtside in vr
and we're adding one more thing that you might want to watch uh where is it
ah thank you this is the mirage camera so it's a
lightweight point-and-shoot style vr 180
camera featuring dual 13-megapixel wide-angle cameras capable of shooting
30 FPS 4k vr 180 video so it supports
either saving content directly to your phone as a 2d video uploading it
straight to youtube or even live streaming at up to 4k vr 180 also to
youtube without any configuration required whatsoever so we are going to
be using this to do a vr tour of our office that you'll be able to watch over
on the lenovo youtube channel now the idea behind recording
180 degrees rather than 360 is that it
doesn't require image stitching which improves the image quality and it can
help with both ensuring that people don't interfere with what you're trying
to film and maintaining the focus of your viewers
vr 180 can also be used to provide a super cool stereo 3d experience when you
watch the footage back on a vr headset it's actually
really trippy uh go check out the vr 180
studio tour that we made in partnership with lenovo we're going to have that linked in the video description and it
is best viewed with a head-mounted display like the mirage headset or a
google cardboard so if you have one try it out and then after that if you're
interested in picking up a mirage solo headset or the mirage camera check out
the links in the description and then we also have links down there to a couple of other creators who also made videos
on the two devices we featured today so thanks again to lenovo for sponsoring
this video thanks to you guys for watching if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it
hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the
video description okay i kind of already said that but it's part of the standard outro what am i going to do at this
point also down there is our merge storage has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should
definitely join