System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: £0.79
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+
Description: This is a VR experience which shows how virtual reality can invoke an involuntary response. I created the first scene – the canyon – as I wanted to demonstrate the effect to friends without having to guide them through a game to a suitable point. It was so effective I wanted to expand on it. This is very much aimed at being an experience you can keep in your library and bring out to show new users – it isn’t a game so there aren’t any challenges in it, and will have less effect on veteran VR users.
Review: This is a small collection of VR experiences designed to invoke an involuntary response. Don’t get this ap confused, it is not trying to help you cure your phobias, it is just showcasing how VR can invoke them. There are several Acrophobia (fear of heights), Claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces), Galeophobia (fear of sharks) and even Nyctophobia which is the fear of the dark. Like I have said before, these experiences are designed to showcase how VR can invoke these fears, it is not designed to be a cure for them.
The main menu is adequate and functional allowing you to easily skip between experiences. While most of the experiences are basic in graphics, they all do their job of invoking the fears they represent and indeed some of them are very scary. This is not so much an app every VR user would download, but it is one for anyone who likes to showcase how immersive VR can be.
A Fear Of Heights And Other Things is designed to be a showcase of how VR can invoke an involuntary response and indeed during the ‘Performing a base jump’ demo (that I didn’t realise was a moving demo) I feared the jump so much that I fell over and bruised my arm on one of our office tables! For me, it is the height ones that get me every time and no matter how in-depth I try and tell someone what it feels like to fear something in VR (that is essentially a screen stuck to your face) it never seems to come across. It’s something you need to see and understand yourself and this app is a good showcase of the different scenarios of fears that VR can invoke in you. I’m not sure it will help anyone get over them, but it might help them understand why they fear it.
