Gadgetory

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that's really too close to your face it's almost like being at a movie theater and sitting in the front row and there's really not much else you can do outside of that realm for now so I'm going to be going over some of the basics on what you can do in this amazing application it's only 15 bucks on Steam at first I was like that's kind of pricey and after I actually pulled the trigger and started playing around with it realize it's completely worth every penny so let's go ahead and just give you guys a brief rundown on what you can do so right now you're seeing what I'm seeing in the virtual desktop application you can see right off the bat my screen is curved something that steamvr cannot do natively and I'm also in space space is pretty cool this is kind of trippy actually and this is one of the free backgrounds that you can switch between in the application so you've also got deep space looks like we're kind of sitting in front of Saturn or some other ringed planet at the moment we've also got purple nebula and then there's also star fielders there's a bunch of little stars floating around us it's the keeping us company and stuff a couple other free environments that you get here are the photo studio which I guess they're taking pictures of these robots over here it's it's pretty cool and then you've also got sunrise this is probably what my what my wife would switch to because it's the scary she's she's scared of space but there's also a couple more that you can buy in the environment store that's that's in steam and you can purchase those for anywhere from $1 to $3 this is the Cerebrus of cerebral Theatre cerebral Theatre pretty much where Professor Xavier goes to you know read minds and so this is really cool you can see right now the screen the screen is curved and tilted kind of above me so this would be great for like leaning back in your chair you know reclining in your chair and watching movies and things like that some some environments you cannot scale though the developer has blocked it so it's pretty much what you see is what you get but I think it's a pretty good distance at least for me for my taste and you've also got a cinema screen which is another one I think this was a $2.00 environment and it's looking a little lonely in here but it's a really cool feeling it really feels like you're at the movie theater again that the screen is kind of tilted upward it's flat this time you cannot curve it it's just just like a movie screen would be and yeah it says it's a really cool really cool feature home theater I think is one that comes with virtual desktop 1.0 I think this just comes stock this is a freebie I'll look looks like you're in more of a home theater and it's also pretty cool the screen is quite a bit smaller than the cinema screen but still pretty sweet and then we've got rick's garage this is probably my favorite and i don't know why i'm not sitting in front of my desk right now but usually i'm sitting in front of my monitor but yeah you can see this is just a more traditional curved screen looks like an Acer predator is on my desk and really cool artwork all around it's just a give you a nice little atmosphere to work in if you so choose now I will say though when you're when I'm looking at this particular virtual screen and it's this close and it's and it's about this size it's a little bit difficult to see smaller text or icon simply because you're shrinking the native resolution so small that it looks kind of shimmery and it's hard to pick out little details so I wouldn't recommend working in this type of environment as cool as it is watching movies and stuff is fine but not doing any actual productive work I'd probably advise against that let me give you guys a quick little demo on watching movie in the cerebral theater it's it's pretty badass I'm gonna fire up some kung fury here I don't know if you guys can hear that but we're gonna put these on oh yeah it's coming through all right so having all these different backgrounds and whatnot is pretty cool however I think more importantly is the ability to scale the monitor well again I can't do it in this environment we'll go back to Dark Nebula here so the ability to kind of just bring the monitor either as close to you as you want or far the hell away is an invaluable feature and probably the most important tool in this application but here you go you've also got screen distance which kind of pulls the screen apart it kind of gives you the illusion of either having this massive screen or a smaller screen that's really close to you so right now at the very lowest it feels like it's like maybe a thirty inch screen in front of my face and as soon as I crank it all the way up the screen physically hasn't gotten much bigger it's just it's oriented in such a way where it feels now like a 20-foot screen it's it's kind of hard to explain you just had to be there guys just had to be there as for screen options you do have the option to curve the screen as it is now or you can make it completely flat and then in that case you're probably going to want to push the screen a little bit further away from you I actually prefer the curved I really do just because it's it feels more natural in a vr space where everything is kind of curved around you in spherical it looks kind of awkward when it's just a flat screen so I do prefer the curved it's really great that you have that feature here there's also multi-monitor support so if you have a second physical monitor connected to your system you can actually display that in the VR environment and it'll just appear right to the you know just adjacent to your primary display and you can orient them you can you know have your primary display straight in front of you and then your your second monitor to the right of you or you can kind of reposition it so that you're looking straight in between both your monitors and there's also this reset orientation option here so basically based on where you're looking you can click that button and your your whole virtual monitor will actually reset to the position you're facing so that's kind of cool if you want to like be computing while you're laying down in bed you can just do that and now all of a sudden or if you want to watch a movie in bed while while looking straight up at the ceiling you can just do that click reset orientation and it'll be right there so floating essentially just tilts your screen upwards a little bit kind of like how we saw in the cerebral Theatre we're just kind of tilted your screen upwards it's just really quick witted do that if you want to again recline in your chair while while using your system there's also clear wallpaper and if you make it transparent you can see straight through your desktop into the the virtual environment behind which is a pretty cool feeling of course all your your desktop icons are still there you can also just have a regular black background for your desktop as well all right we've also got some audio options here including voice command support so you can essentially tell the application to do any of these basic commands so switching to different tabs you can reset the orientation showing or launching games straight from the application returning to desktop from your game or asking what time it is so what time is it what time is it current time is 9:41 a.m. you're damn right it's 9:40 1 a.m. switch to bindings reset orientation awesome stuff okay so you got voice commands there you can change the accuracy level of it say use a lower value if it doesn't recognize what you're saying use a higher value if it picks up commands incorrectly so based on how well it's receiving your commands you can adjust that and maybe get some better feedback there's also a vocal feedback which is kind of like windows narrator environment sounds let's go ahead and check that on now we've got some environment sounds for our various environments so it starts with an intro chime anytime you start a new startup a new environment gives you kind of an introductory some of them give you an introductory audio audio cue but then you've just got some ambient noise I don't know how well you can hear it but it just kind of sounds like we're in this big scary metal ball because we are pretty cool I would turn that off if you you know want to watch movies and stuff so it doesn't interfere you've also got these let me switch back to one of these face ones also got side by side options so an example of this would be side by side content so you know if you ever watch a YouTube video and it's even it's got that split it's like meant to be 3d and it's like we got two images one for your left eye one for your right eye they look pretty similar like they're almost duplicates but they're not and then it's only when you actually have a programmer application to put them together do you see this like 360 or this kind of 3d image so let me go ahead and try to find that right now all right so we've got this side by side video from Sony just a bunch of robots in space we'll go ahead and check the on screen and then we'll fullscreen the video and see what we see all right so to me it just looks like one single image there's no splitting of the the two images and I could see these robot guys flying in here and it does look very 3d um kind of a cool thing that you could do you're still in space as well so yeah and if you could if you saw from the actual YouTube video it's it's a side-by-side image so it's actually split so you can see it's two separate images doesn't look anything like what I was feeling when that side-by-side option was enabled so pretty cool stuff there's also other options depending on if you're using a headset blah blah blah I'm not going to go too into detail with that windows integration so you can mirror the headset mirror what the headset is viewing to a window this is exactly what I have up right here I just have this open so I can capture it with xsplit you can also do that mirror it to a generic picture and picture monitor you've also got force open VR which forces the use of open VR when you're using a rift for example you can show error notifications start the program when windows starts up also open VR options so you can show chaperone chaperone is the the blue grid or the the gridlines that pop up anytime you're near or approaching your boundaries that you've set for your room scaling and you've also got return to death return to desktop moving on to bindings you've got some hotkey options here that you can customize to do various simple tasks like reducing the screen size resetting the orientation things like that so pretty cool stuff just helps you navigate a little bit easier you also have the option to launch games through virtual desktop 1.0 however I wasn't able to do so successfully I tried rocket League ta5 and counter strike and each one gave me a problem rocket strike just straight up wouldn't launch it just said failed for some reason counter strike gave me an alert that I was not launching the game straight from Steam so it flagged it as you know potential cheating or whatever so I wasn't able to actually play the game through this application and then GTA 5 not necessarily virtual desktops fault but for some reason I couldn't log into Rockstar social it was just giving me grief so I just said screw it I don't know if this really works or how well it works I tried three different games failed every time however once this gets patched up or maybe in desparate all desktop 2.0 I could see this being really useful instead of having to always go back into steam to launch your games 360 video or I'm sorry 360 photo allows you to drag and drop 360 or panoramic photos into your virtual desktop library and then from there you can just view them with your VR headset so this is actually my wedding this is my wedding reception back in August of 2015 and this is before everyone came and crashed the place but you can kind of see a little bit of how it looked there was the the reception or like the ceremony area though the chairs and stuff we had the reception in ceremony kind of in the same spot but yeah it's pretty cool my friend Ian actually took this picture dirt on that day and I asked him to send it to me so it's pretty cool obviously there's some distortion at the top and bottom of the picture but it's pretty cool just being able to relive certain moments this is um let me get a better one here this was our Hawaii trip maybe a year or two ago we did some ATV riding this is actually the same island where they shot a lot of Jurassic Park the original Jurassic Park not not Jurassic world but again really really cool stuff okay bye honey this we it's weird to kiss you and not and not see you with my eyes open you look like a cloud alright now let's check out some 360 video playback you have the option of pasting a URL like straight from YouTube so if you go on YouTube search for a 360 video you can just straight up paste it in really simple it'll automatically download and start playing in the player here I've already got a couple of them open so there's this uh roller coaster from Six Flags Magic Mountain which I would not advise anyone watching I'm not going to put that put you guys through that right now and we've got this really cool and from Discovery BR and Mythbusters on a shark shipwreck which is really cool obviously like it's shot in 4k and it's you can watch it in 4k on YouTube however it does lose some quality in the VR environment I'm not gonna say it's super crisp or anything but Buster's it is still very cool this is a demand note how is that I don't you turn around you won't see me because I'm not here I'm just doing the narration behind that diver who happens to be our executive producer checking the place out prior to our experiments you can see that somewhat predictably the wreck is guarded by a bunch of sharks so very cool stuff I really really do like the 360 features in virtual desktop I think they work really well assuming that you have good content good high quality footage to to feed it and I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say about this particular application obviously highly recommend it to any user with the VR headset just to expand the functionality of your desktop and your VR headset again not so great for productive productivity purposes however any kind of content or media playback I think would be outstanding to to use this in it's just a really cool way to watch movies to experience TV shows on a 20 20 foot screen and things like that it really is quite cool and just being able to adjust you know your virtual monitor properties is pretty key also uh if I do have a critique or two for this application it would be to have some support for the vibe controller mouse and keyboard functionality is really good at the tracking super good something that's not so hot in Steam vrs desktop mode the mouse cursor is always like flickering in and out and it's hard to track with it so that's good but when you're leaning back watching movies you're kind of putting yourself further away from your mouse so it would be nice to also have the support for the HTC vive controller where you could just kind of pick it up almost like a remote controller and pointed it around and you know click on you know larger icons and things as long as you're not trying to like you know checkmark those boxes in xsplit or something super tiny the vibe controller should work fine for that so it would have been nice to see some support for that maybe in the future also the Xbox 360 controller maybe put some multimedia functionality in some of those keys and some of those buttons for that controller especially when you're watching content like YouTube videos just mix it for overall easier viewing so just some critiques there but overall great job to the guy who made this again highly recommend and hopefully you guys enjoyed getting a gist of what it's all about so if you did and you enjoyed it go ahead and toss me a like on the video subscribe to the channel for more tech videos coming in the near future and until next time I'll see you guys in the next video