Monday 3-4-24 Virtual Reality & Having Fun

 

Awesome Day

We had an awesome day. It felt like a spring day with the high in the low 80s.

The other day I mentioned, that the Twister virtual pinball game had different rooms. I'll try to explain what I meant by this. When you play games in virtual reality you put on a headset (Quest 3). Once the headset is on you see what is displayed inside the headset, on pinball you can't see any "real" things around you.  A menu comes up where you select the game you want to play. When the game opens you are inside a virtual room, some of these rooms are minimal, maybe only part of a room with the pinball machine, some stripes on the wall and maybe a poster or end table. On some games the room is far more sophisticated, Twister even has multiple rooms to choose from. The rooms put you inside a tornado, where you can see what is happening around you. From the perspective inside the headset some rooms appear to be a normal size room, others might make it seem as if you are outside and things are made to that scale. These rooms can seem so real, they are amazing. Below are the Twister rooms.

 

Lightening at the far end of a field

A house being tossed in a tornado

 

The field before the tornado

 

Going down the highway during the tornado

 

The floor and posters of the movie Twister

Our floor in virtual reality

The tornado coming towards you

Many of the virtual reality games have to be purchased but all the pinball games are free. Sometimes a pinball game is developed by an individual, he might spend more than a year working on it, other games are developed by teams of people and might still take a year to develop. Hard to believe that it is for free. Part of the reason is they love doing what they do and part of it is to try and avoid legal trouble. Since many of these games are direct copies of real pinball machines including all the artwork if they were to sell the games they would be in violation of copyright laws and could be sued. By giving the work away they tend to avoid this. There have been a couple of pinball manufactures send letters threatening to sue if their games are not removed, the community then removed the games from that company and no longer reproduce any of their work. There are other pinball companies who have no problem with their tables being recreated as long as the table is more than three years old.

We started today out by attending Di Green and Terry McCann's Weekly C1 dance at 9:00 for an hour and fifteen minutes. Di called five tips to 16 participants. Today the songs began with the letter F so when when got back home we celebrated with a fist and raising a foot. She called some four couple moves we don't dance to that often. They were Relay The Shadow, Checkmate the Column and Tally Ho. Larry danced with me. We had a fun morning.

Before the dance I vacuumed the house.

I worked on the diamond painting of Winnie the Pooh and Friends.

After the dance I did the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event was Event: Easy Street Mini of 15 games. It took me 22 minutes and 35 seconds, which put me in 10th place in my group. Then I moved onto playing Angry Birds.

Larry took me to Popeyes for lunch. We hadn't been to Popeyes in years and it was nice to return. We shared a two piece chicken plate with mashed potatoes and gravy, a biscuit and a medium drink. We bought an extra biscuit. We had a great experience. The store was clean and the service was very good.

In the afternoon we had a home grocery delivery from Walmart. Larry brought the groceries inside because I was working out. When I finished I put the food and stuff away.

My workout was a half hour on the Wii Fit. I really enjoy working out in virtual reality using Synth Riders. Today I worked out to seven songs for about an hour and burned 181 calories. The songs were I Love You Then, It Ain't Right, Nightmare Cure, Delight, Light Up The Night, Imperfection and Empire. Each song has a different routine to hit the balls to. I did each song twice. While I was working out with Synth Riders Larry stood in front of me for a long time and I never saw him because I was in my room.

The pinball games I played today were Twister, Cactus Canyon and Cirqus Voltaire. While playing Cirqus Voltaire I joined the cirqus but didn't defeat the ringmaster. It was a great game and I got on the high score board, I came in 4th. 

Cirqus Voltaire

Cactus Canyon

In the evening we watched The Suicide Squad from our movies. 

Larry stayed up past his bedtime playing with a new virtual reality program. The program is very cool, you put in an address or place you want to see and using Google Street View it takes you there. Larry put in the address of the home I grew up in and it put me right in front of the house. It was like standing in the street looking at the house, you can turn around and see all the neighboring houses and even move down the street. Larry stood outside his mom's house and waved. He also went to Yellowstone and looked at some of the places we have visited. The pictures are not live, the month and year they were taken is displayed and if there is history you might even be able to go back in time. The oldest views Larry found was 2006. This is all based on Google Street View and they have only been around so long. This is a very cool program. 

There were lots of reviews on the program, people loved that they could see things like the Eiffel Tower and The Pyramids of Egypt, places that they will never get to visit in real life. Many folks talked about spending hours and hours using it. This program cost $10 and you can use it as much as you like, there are very few things you can do today for $10.

After Larry went to bed I watched Dolittle on Freevee. It starred Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Dolittle. I ended up doing 18,000 steps, which put me in 4th place in my group.