As a consumer playing around with what is, officially, still just devkit – one of the annoyances of the Rift at the moment is having to remove the headset and return to your desktop in between demos.

A number of applications are currently vying to be the go-to VR OS or software platform. Currently, the most notable of these are SteamVR and virtualreality.io. Other attempts at a more wholesale VR Desktop like Ibex are beginning to appear as well, meanwhile applications like JanusVR gesture towards an entirely different evolutionary path. This is a precarious space to be in right now because some of OculusVR’s latest hires make it clear that they plan on having a first-party software platform of their own ready for the release of the consumer Rift.

The Gate is an interesting attempt to build a user-friendly walled garden of VR content in the image of the console and mobile ecosystems. Indeed, inspiration from smart-phone UI permeates most interactions in The Gate. Certainly, the home screen icons are very reminiscent of iOS. Talking of phones, the most notable, and novel, innovation of The Gate is the ability to use a touchscreen device as a controller, by downloading an Android or iOS app. This was very easy to get working and is immediately accessible, although you need to make sure your device is oriented correctly. Touching the screen makes a marker appear in your view and icons can be selected by tapping the screen with a second finger. Multi-touch gestures like pinch-zoom and three-finger swipe allow for a reasonable vocabulary of verbs – although less than a standard gamepad, it has to be said.

In many cases the touch input feels surprisingly intuitive – somewhere between the abstraction of mouse and keyboard and the natural interaction of motion controls. I certainly feel like there’s a lot more to explore with using a phone as an input device. For example, could certain assumptions about the way a user is holding their device, coupled with gyro and accelerometer data, be used to render a crude virtual phone being held by an avatar? Could the phone camera be used to provide basic hand-tracking?

As implemented in the Gate, however the touch controls are a welcome innovation, but not a game-changer. They shine for menu interaction and in the Google maps application but prove an awkward means of moving an avatar about, especially when you’re also trying to select and interact with objects. Clumsy locomotion can quickly lead to nausea as is apparent even in the demo room.

You currently only have five options in The Gate: a demonstration 3D environment, a Google maps viewer, a Photo viewer, a game prototype called the Cave and an Internet browser. It does not yet seem to be possible to load your own applications into the launcher, like virtualreality.io, which leaves The Gate a bit of a platform without a purpose, at this stage. The demo room is cute, but unremarkable. The Maps viewer is probably the most joyous thing to explore but has little utility and won’t hold your attention forever. The game, The Cave, is a pretty reasonable little shooter but it doesn’t do much to show off the benefits of touch controls in VR. It’s very easy to throw yourself into a spin and wind up feeling sick. I found the best way to play was to bring myself to a stop and fire from a high stationary vantage point, which also kind of felt like cheating.

The internet browser places web-pages on walls as if they were paintings in a gallery. It evokes a strange sense of walking through a museum of relics of the past – which may well be how we one day feel about some of our favourite websites – but compared to something like JanusVR, The Gate’s VR browser does not do much to bring that day about. This particular vision of the VR web adds a great deal of inconvenience without adding any of the unique benefits that Janus offers.

While this may seem all negative – there is a lot that has been very competently done. The menu interactions and load transitions are really nice – natural and smooth. I like that you can select your Oculus profile on start-up – that is a nice touch that I wish more demos implemented. When you’re playing around in the menus, you feel like you could get used to The Gate as lean-back software launcher and browser. Unfortunately, the actual software on show right now isn’t showcasing the platform especially well.

The developers are clearly talented and none of the games and apps are bad, but they do all need varying degrees of work to be any kind of a draw into the platform. Everything is still a work in progress but I can’t help but wonder in progress towards what? Could this be a lot better if it were a bit more focussed? Most of the built-in applications perform functions that can be done better elsewhere. The thing that it does do very well – provide a comfortable and natural application browser – is meaningless until we can load our own applications into the platform. Even then how valuable is a slick touch interface if we have to switch to a gamepad when we launch most games? Multi-touch controls seem to be a unique selling point, but outside of the menus and a couple of viewer apps, they actually prove to be a liability. The Gate tries to be a jack of all trades, and unfortunately winds up being a master of none. I don’t think it’s the solution to the VR Platform question, at least not yet, but it does enough of interest to hold your attention for about an hour and I commend it for its input innovations, even if it doesn’t seem quite sure about what to do with them.

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