Oh my gosh it's finally over, this one was in the oven for a while. I was first approached by Hig in mid-late March, started writing the script around May and actually finished it in June (granted, some of that delay was because I got the idea for the Miracle-Chan video in May and rushed to work on that while it was still fresh in my mind).
Despite the months of use my opinion on these gloves took ages to solidify (and likewise it took me ages to figure out a good angle for this video). My last 2 hardware videos were pretty easy to write since my opinion formed pretty quickly and didn't shift around afterwards, the Pico Motion Trackers were cool and should've been a game changer, but weren't because of Pico being banned in the US, so I wanted to showcase them. The Pimax Swords are funny and I just wanted to entertain how usable they were in current year (not very). These gloves are tricky since they significantly enhanced my VRChat experience, while also being borderline unusable at times. They provide a novel and interesting new form factor, while also having blatent issues with their hardware. The software mostly just worked for me, but others have had a terrible time with it and it's stuck in discord limbo.
Once I'd settled on the "day in the life" showcase for the video, everything else fell into place. While I did alter the timeline a bit to make the script flow better, pretty much everything I described, from the camera issues to the chats with strangers in public lobbies to the impromptu beat saber session cutting my time with the gloves short, actually happened while I was testing out these gloves. I initially planned on going back and getting dedicated B-Roll for when I was talking about them, but it turned out I'd already filmed myself playing beat saber when it first happened! A lot of the first-person B-Roll was also filmed as I was testing the gloves.
It was definitely an interesting experience to work with a sponsor, I seriously didn't expect something like this to happen so soon, doubly so that it was a hardware sample and not just reading talking points for a VPN or shitty mobile game (inb4 this haunts me in the future). For what it's worth Hig were pretty chill during communications and explicitly said they wanted honest reviews, which I respect a lot (even if it's probably biting them in the ass now since these gloves probably aren't ready for that kind of spotlight). I'm slightly annoyed Richard Virgosky was able to beat me to the punch of making the first english-language coverage of these (IIRC), but I can at least take solace in being the second (and that our video styles are so different that both videos can easily co-exist, like I basically just didn't cover the setup process and mostly focused on the user experience), as I said at the end of the video, go check out other reviews! There's definitely stuff about these gloves that I didn't cover that you may want to know! (My favourite anecdote is that one bilibili user had the software fail because it only works if your windows username is written with english characters). Speaking of which oh my gosh the bilibili tangent. I definitely could've talked more about that (half considered doing an interview with someone at Hig like a Phia video) but never followed through on most of it since it really wasn't relevant (and I also really cannot understand Chinese. I was a bit worried about the two jokes I put in that section since I really don't like parroting the same tired social credit memes etc. I figured using sun quan the emperor (a song I actually really like) instead of one of those generic old-timey sounding Chinese songs (alongside outright saying in mandarin that I don't really understand) would help ease that. Also yeah in hindsight writing a joke that required me to speak Mandarin probably wasn't the best idea but hopefully my pronounciation wasn't too bad? Oops that tangent went on for a while.
I'll have to wait a while to properly reflect on my feelings on this video (and the miracle chan video tbh), there are things about the production of both of them that I like, and there's nothing that I'd really change, but I've also definitely settled into a groove and we'll have to see how long it takes for me to get bored of it (truth be told I'm already getting tired of VR videos and am starting to look elsewhere for future ideas). I will say, I got way too ambitious with overly long takes for this video (I wasn't kidding in the blooper reel when I said one of them took me over 40 attempts), definitely gonna be scaling that back for the next one. I've got one more VR idea brewing in my mind and another ambitious non-VR idea that I may work on in august/september, then as previously stated I'm off to uni and pausing production in anticipation of the much larger workload compared to school. But that's all for the future, you probably just came here for the music used. Sorry for making you read so much, hopefully you enjoyed it? Who knows, here's the music.
Holy moly you actually read all this way? Well shoot thanks for caring this much! Here, take the blooper reel
