Oculus Gallery Review

Oculus Gallery is an application available on the Oculus Quest 2 for viewing pictures. It allows users to view pictures they have taken using their Oculus Quest 2 in a variety of different ways; it also enables them to colour-correct, zoom in and remove red eyes from their pictures.

Oculus call this “true depth”, but I’ve always called it that thing that makes your face look like it’s floating beneath your neck like you’re some sort of misshapen ghost.

To start off with, the app lets you look through all of your photos by simply selecting “Photo Albums” and choosing which album you would like to view; alternatively, you can select specific albums or specific folders depending on how organised you are (or aren’t).

However, the real magic happens when you select a specific photo. You can now move around it with your gaze by simply looking left or right, up or down; using the controller, you can click on the left stick to change how far in you would like to zoom. The picture itself looks great and is surprisingly sharp for something that’s only displayed through lenses 2.5 inches away from your eyes. However, I did find a few issues with this – if you don’t hold still while looking at a picture for too long (around 5 seconds), the image will become slightly blurry and lose focus for a couple of seconds before returning to normal. Also, even though it was really crisp and clear while standing completely still in the middle of the room, as soon as I moved my head around to look at it from different angles (even if they were all pretty much behind me), the quality became significantly worse; this was especially true for pictures taken in low lighting.

Another issue is that you can’t simply swipe through your photos like you would on a normal phone: there are no swiping gestures available so you need to use the controller instead. This essentially means that you either have to point your controller away from where you’re looking and click on the left stick or press down on the trackpad and then move it towards where you’re looking and click it again – which basically forces you into doing some creepy neck-stretching dance every time that you want to look at a different picture.

The final thing that I’d like to talk about is the colour-correction tool, which appears when you select one of your pictures and press “Edit”. It allows you to adjust how bright or dark the photo is by selecting different parts of the image on the screen. However, it’s really frustrating because I feel like you can only use it properly if you have perfect vision – anything slightly out of focus may as well not even be there. Also, some bits are clearly meant to be highlighted with red so that they stand out more – except this doesn’t work either for some reason because it just takes away all of the sharpness from that part instead. Speaking of which, zooming in with this tool is a nightmare because anything not in focus becomes blurry, so you have to basically sit there with the controller still and move your face around until things look good enough.

If you can get past these issues then I guess that this app is okay – but the truth is that the whole thing just makes me wish that I could view my photos on a normal phone instead.

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