AVROD - VR Voyaging

AVROD is the Archaeological Virtual Reality Online Database… dedicated to digitizing and sharing the world’s archaeological and cultural heritage sites. Our mission is to enhance the way people learn about history and archaeology through fully immersive virtual reality technologies.
From the product description

About the Experience

On finding AVROD on Steam and Viveport, I expected something cool. Screenshots showed a variety of locations around the world that you could see closeup. Just choose from 40+ locations and become an explorer. Unfortunately, this app fails to deliver on any promise.

Graphics and Sound

Launching the app, you are placed on the surface of a planet with a massive globe floating in the air, or in some sort of futuristic ship bay with tantalizing callouts for possible destinations (I haven’t determined if this is based on the Viveport version vs Steam version or something else).

The graphics seem fair and the sound effects are fine, but not worth much without the rest of the app working. I have no idea how it looks to actually visit one of their sites.

Information Content

It appears that AVROD intends to provide background information about the selections. There are some help-related cards you can popup, but they are pretty minimal.

Navigation and Interactivity

Having written some articles about good user experiences in VR apps, I’m pretty appalled by the controls. Reaching out to things requires hold your weird wand on a control for 2-3 seconds. If you reach through the control at all, it might not activate. If you move much while waiting for the 2-3 second activation, it will restart the timer. It’s infuriating.

Assuming you can actually get to the login “terminal”, be prepared to really lose it. You tap on a VR keyboard like a xylophone to spell out a username. You may wonder what this username is. I couldn’t really tell you. It appears that you just make one up then you can select which one when you visit in the future. In actuality, you tap this name (once you think you just type in something random), then click the Go/Enter key, then get ready to fall over or puke. The immersion just breaks as visuals freeze for 5+ seconds. The first split second you don’t realize it, so then you move your head at all, and reality comes crashing down. Eventually, it looks like it comes back, but there’s no error or message of any type. Visuals are unfrozen, but you need to restart to do anything with the keyboard.

I noticed later, that on the desktop you can see an error message that might be implying that some database isn’t setup or available. You likely won’t even see this error if you exit the app from VR.