I decided to try out an app called VR Diving where you can choose from a set of different underwater environments to experience either just on your phone or with Google Cardboard:
I chose the first one, Ocean Shark Shipwreck 360, to review. Here are a few screenshots of the experience, taken from the normal phone view rather than the Google Cardboard view for ease of viewing on the computer:
Ignore the quality setting – I set it to “high” later on but there wasn’t really any noticeable difference.
This 360 video showed different clips of sharks and fish swimming underwater. When you tilt your head down, you can either see coral or darker blue ocean water, and when you tilt your head up you can see the sun shining onto the surface of the water. While the videos appear to be taken from real life, the sound does not – there is a creepy sort of music along with sounds that sound like bubbles.
I’m a little confused as to what the purpose of this environment is. On one hand, it could be a cool way to represent what scuba diving is like. On the other hand, it could be meant to scare the user because of the music and, at one point, one of the sharks eats the camera. However, this experience was an odd mix of the two. It wasn’t quite like a realistic representation of scuba diving because of the strange sound effects and also because of the fact that every so often, the video would suddenly transition to a slightly different scene with an unnatural fade in/out effect. It also wasn’t quite scary, because the bubbly noises distracted from the scary music, and most of the sharks didn’t seem to mind the user.
It makes more sense for this to be aiming for a realistic representation of scuba diving, because the rest of the worlds you can pick fit along with this theme. In terms of how the view is composed, it is pretty effective, especially because it uses real footage and the slight haziness is similar to how it feels to wear goggles underwater. The editing done to the footage, like the transitions and sound effects, are the components that would need to be improved.