The Ghost’s Spotlight: Salsa Virtual, Towards a Perilous Journey

Welcome to a new episode of The Ghost’s Spotlight, where I give you brief opinions and reviews about VR products that I have tried.

Today I want to tell you about two indie products that I have tried: Salsa Virtual and Towards a Perilous Journey.

Salsa Virtual

Salsa Virtual is a VR experience that teaches you Salsa.

The experience has been created by Jorge Ortiz, that during the college years decided to take dance lessons and fell in love with this activity. Later on, he even became a dance teacher, because he wanted to make people’s live better through dancing. Lately, he has decided to mix his passion for dance with his love for technology and created a full VR course on Salsa in a VR experience called Salsa Virtual.

In Salsa Virtual, you can enjoy a full course on salsa in VR. You start with the very basics (how to balance yourself, how to move your weight from one foot to the other one and so on) and then proceed on to learn more complicated stuff (how to keep the rhythm and how to move with a partner), and then continue learning how to perform the various steps and in the end, you learn how to properly dance salsa.

The training works this way: you are in a big building with lots of floors and each floor corresponds to a different lesson. You start from floor 1 and enjoy the lesson on dancing gasics. Then, when you have finished, you go to floor 2, where you start learning more complicated movements. Then you go to floor 3, and so on… until you are a Salsa master. I like the building paradigm: it lets you follow all the lessons in order with a natural 3D spatial interface.

Every lesson is comprised of some movements that a virtual teacher teaches you. The teacher is one (or two, depending on what kind of movements you should learn) virtual avatar, whose voice and movements have been recorded by a real-life dance teacher. She tells you what you have to do and at the same time, she shows you with her body the movements you have to perform. As in all dance rooms, there is a mirror, so you can see in it how you are performing in copying the movements of your master.

The idea is really interesting: VR is great for education because it can immerse the student in a situation as if it was real and this is a case where this use fits perfectly. Furthermore, learning how to dance in VR gives people the possibility to give a try to dance without having the possibility of feeling ashamed because of their bad coordination. Everyone can put a headset on and start learning how to do the basic movements, alone at home, and give dancing a try in full peace, without caring about the opinions of other people and learning at his/her own pace. That’s powerful and I think that it is the great potential of Salsa Virtual.

I also think that Salsa Virtual is a great example of why we shouldn’t consider VR and real-life as two things in contrast, but as two realities that help each other. Dancing is something that has to be performed in person, but Salsa Virtual can make new people getting interested in Salsa, learning its basics alone at home, without the fear of feeling ashamed, falling in love with it, and then enrolling in a salsa school and start dancing in real life. I like the concept of Salsa Virtual a lot.

What I like less is how Salsa Virtual has been implemented. First of all, the application looks unpolished and there are bugs here and there, plus elements that look rough. Then, there are some choices that I don’t get, like the possibility of studying Salsa outdoor, in an environment of a park, that is actually made by various 360 photos of a park, that change throughout the lesson (??).

But the worst thing is maybe how the teaching is implemented. The movements of the teacher are animations with mediocre quality (probably they have been recorded with Vive Trackers or Kinects), that lets you understand what is the movement that you have to perform, but that don’t show you the perfect execution of that movement.

But apart this, the real problem is that you have no idea on how you are performing. The teacher usually makes a movement with her feet or her body that you have to replicate. But:

1. Most probably you don’t have Vive trackers on your feet, so actually in VR you can’t see how you are moving your feet;
2. The teacher doesn’t control that you are performing well, so actually you could just make all movements wrong and still continue the course.

These are all big issues, but I don’t want to blame the developers for that, because actually, I don’t know I would have fixed these problems myself. Recording a high-quality animation requires expensive equipment that indies can’t afford. And to make a proper learning experience on dancing, you absolutely need to know the position of the feet, but currently, VR focuses mainly on hands… so, how to solve that? The devs have made their best by adding the possibility to have Vive Trackers on your feet, but honestly, people having them are very few.

Honestly, I don’t know. I think that Salsa Virtual is an interesting and original project, but it should be polished more and it should be played only with Vive Trackers or similar hardware. Maybe it should be played in LBVR centers, that can supply the trackers to their users. Furthermore, I also think that the experience should control more the movements that the user is performing, so to check that he/she is actually learning well.

That said, if you want to learn dancing at home and give Salsa Virtual a try, you can find it on Steam for $19.99.

Towards a Perilous Journey

Towards a Perilous Journey is an indie game that tries to mix action and music. It is like playing an old-school shoot’ em up game, but in 3D VR and with some cool music in the background.

In the game, you have two spaceships that hold the same position of your hands. There will be various enemies attacking you: some of them will just go towards you, while others will start shooting you. You can imagine what you have to do: dodge the bullets and shoot the enemies.

There are various levels and all levels feature a different background song that will guide you while you play. Each level will also let you earn coins with which you can buy upgrades for your ships (more shield, better weapons and so on).

There is also the concept of the energy to manage, that according to the developer is the main mechanic. The more you destroy enemies, the more you earn energy that you can use to trigger shields and secondary attacks.

The idea of the game is nice: I liked the idea of controlling the two ships with my hands and I also enjoyed playing something that reminded me the game that I played in the 90s. I found dodging bullets particularly interesting… I remember how I used to try dodging them in vertical scrolling 2D action games, where the screen was full of enemy bullets, but this time in VR! Really cool…

But I have also to say that this is clearly a game made by a little indie studio with a low budget, so IMHO it looks a bit rough. Furthermore, I think that the game design has to be improved since I found the levels a bit monotonous or repetitive.

You can find Towards a Perilous Journey on Steam or Oculus Store for $11.99.

Let’s all support indies that tries to create some innovative concepts in VR!

(Header image by Sparkly Games)