System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £3.99
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Educational
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Standing or Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+
Description: You are gaining early access to a developing “Learning Tool” as well as a future “Home Simulation Game”. With the increasing cost of Electricity at home, we have tried to explain the next stage of Home Power Management. Our simulator explains how a home of the future (available now) will maintain usable electricity for the house owner, during night day and occasional blackouts. Using a Solar and Battery setup…. the simulation shows how power flows from the Solar panels into a Solar Battery and is consumed by household appliances…
All of the components are configurable and we have tried to be as realistic as possible with all aspects. From the position of the sun in the sky down to the weather conditions. Very soon the Simulator will have a gaming component, where the player has to maintain the house as cheaply as possible and upgrade the house as money permits adding fun and teaching to how power is used in a real home. We hope you will join us on the journey and help us create a useful informational VR experience.
Review: Home Tech VR is a showcase of how various types of renewable energy will change the home of the future. Done in an educational style you will learn about different methods of generating energy as well as how to implement it into your own home.
There are a few locations to explore from solar farms, power stations and of course a fully integrated home where you can also test all sorts of sustainable power inputs. With various things to interact with this is an app that has more educational elements than fun about it, but then again this is a very serious subject matter that we should all be learning about.
While I understand the information this app is trying to get across and its importance I still think this should have been a free app. Sure it doesn’t cost that much anyway, but that is just my opinion. To be fair is a very informative VR experience that looks pretty good. But half of it is still to come and it would have been much better as a guided tour with spoken narration. Oh! And don’t even start me on how nauseating the “observation tower” climb was. For an app that chooses teleportation as a way to get about, the moving animation of the tower climb was a terrible idea.
For anyone who wishes to run a clean home with sustainable energy, this could be very handy indeed. But for the average person, this will be little or no interest. But at least there is a small amount of fun to be had with the basketball court.
