Pillow is a new mixed reality app for Quest from the creator of Where Thoughts Go, designed to be used while lying down on your bed and looking up at the ceiling.
Get comfortable, put on your headset on and lie down with your head on a pillow – just make sure you have the room set up properly in the Quest settings first.
Pillow turns your bedroom ceiling into a variety of relaxing scenes and minigames designed around winding down and taking a break from the stresses of life. The app currently features four 'dreams', alongside beta multiplayer support.
I tried the app out earlier today and while initially skeptical – when I'm trying to properly relax, a headset admittedly isn't the first thing I reach for – I found the experience pretty interesting and, at times, quite relaxing.
The best of the four experiences on offer is one which turns your ceiling into a pond and grants you a rod to fish with. Each day, the rooftop pond will feature a different question – when you catch a fish from the pond, it will play another user's anonymous recorded response to that day's question. It's a concept that Pillow developer Lucas Rizzotto borrows from his other experience, Where Thoughts Go, which is based around a similar concept.
After catching a fish, they will swim around your room as you continue to catch others and listen to responses. Once you're ready to leave, you can record your own response, which gets embedded into a fish that you fling up into the pond for others to discover.
One of the other experiences revolves around stargazing, allowing you to rotate around the night sky, discover constellations and listen to stories about their history. Another revolves around meditation, asking you to place a controller on your belly so it can track you breath. As you breathe in and out, the world around you will gradually expand into a virtual space. The last of the bunch – and arguably least interesting – involves an interactive storybook that works like a dynamic choose-your-own-adventure experience.
There's nothing revolutionary on offer in Pillow, but it's an interesting meditation (no pun intended) on how we might use mixed reality for immersive applications that don't revolve strictly around gaming. It's also just cool to discover an app built around lying down instead of standing or sitting – if nothing else, that's certainly unique.
There's a lot of potential for Pillow to expand out with more explorations of ceiling-based mixed reality – we'll be interested to see what else gets added over time.
