I feel a sense of gratefulness to the virtual reality community for supporting me over the years, unlike any other technical community the sense of camaraderie is very strong, admittedly the feeling of closeness has changed slightly over the last few months as it is becoming more mainstream and the community growing, from a hamlet to a village and now a city, only the original Hamlet dwellers will probably know who I am :), in all seriousness – it’s fantastic to see people who hungered for VR finally able to jump in. The oculus subreddit has been a hub for this community of course. Forming the VRspies was a blessing and a curse, I was blessed with meeting amazing people who have changed my life, then cursed by introducing a commercial element which feels like I personally poisoned the well, maybe it’s more accurate to say I killed the golden goose by trying to market friendship. Sinful.
I don’t have the biggest channel in the world but I never set out for that, I only ever wanted to share the emotion of being inside the virtual world, to give people a sense of what it feels like to experience virtual reality. Now it is out there, people are able to find out for themselves, so I started to question my motivation for running the UKRifter channel. Initially I thought I could represent all the different virtual reality manufacturers and provide a balanced review of the experiences available, I have found it has been almost impossible for me to convince anyone outside of the oculus community that I am not biased towards oculus (my laser comments didn’t endear me to Vive owners + my pseudonym has always been a curse).
You could argue my bias is a fair observation, I stand by oculus as being the best quality headset available today, admittedly there is always the variable of human physiology which will make any statement of bias slightly questionable, however, on balance I strongly believe Oculus is the better on every level – from software to hardware.
So it is with some strange – but strong – sense of defeat, I will be changing the direction of my channel to be Oculus HMD only. Is it important? Arguably no. When you see a game review on YouTube you rarely care if the reviewer is running AMD or Nvidia, after all much of what I plan to review will run cross-HMD and at least with the oculus store sorting the wheat from the chaff so I don’t have too.
Now the decision is made it will give me more time to put out more content. Also – selling my Vive will certainly help with the Christmas present bill 🙂
I am writing this in a pub, on a table by myself, friends are getting annoyed with me, but I’m not in the mood to celebrate this weekend. I feel sad for some reason.
Anyway, thanks all, sorry if this alienates anyone. Not my intention, never has been. But in reality – I have never been able to shake the title of oculus fanboy, so screw it – I won’t fight it, I will embrace it and in doing so I will focus on what is best for VR.
It’s odd you feel like you might be a little biased, for a while I contemplated unsubscribing from your channel when it seemed like for months on end you were posting Vive-only content. Now that the Touch is out I appreciate why you might have done so; I completely underestimated how much the controls add to experience. Anyway I’m glad to be back. Cheer up 🙂
I personally feel Oculus has a lot going for it beside the hardware. There is a lot of debate about which is the best headset right *now* but what of the long term? We’re investiging in the platform be it Vive or Oculus through purchases of hardware and software yet I’m puzzle why (in general) the VR community seems to discount the R&D team behind Oculus (Abrash, Carmack, etc.) I feel like we’re bound to see continued innovations like Async Time Warp and Space Warp from a company with their pedigree. While Facebook isn’t something I personally go for, I appreciate the difference it’s money can make to accelerating the roadmap and helping fund games that would otherwise go unmade.
Hi mate, sorry I missed this message. Yes, a lot of vive content, main reasons are a) I had one computer b) vive is kids favourite c) I had a long queue of reviews I had promised to devs. Now it’s all changed. I have a second more powerful computer, I have ditched the vive (sold). So it’s oculus all the way now.