Samsung and Oculus have teamed up to create the Samsung Gear VR, a new virtual reality headset which uses the Galaxy Note 4 to operate.
This acts as an add-on for the phone, essentially holding it in place and coming with a number of apps for VR capabilities. It uses the power of the phone as well as its 5.7 inch 1440p AMOLED screen for the display.
It’s releasing as an “Innovator Edition” at first, which is for enthusiasts and developers rather than the general public. This is powered by the Oculus Mobile SDK which brings four new experiences to the mobile device. Those are:
- Oculus Home is a simple interface for connecting to the Oculus Store, where you can discover, download, and launch VR content.
- Oculus Cinema is a virtual movie theater, where you can playback your favorite 2D and 3D movies in a variety of theater environments.
- Oculus 360 Videos and Oculus 360 Photos are experiences that allow you to playback panoramic content in VR.
It’s still early days for mobile VR. Some of the key challenges include a lack of 6DOF positional tracking, limited CPU/GPU bandwidth with today’s hardware, thermal management, power consumption, and overall ergonomics, but we’re making progress quickly and the Innovator Edition is only just the beginning. Still, the experience on the device today is pretty astounding.
The headset will be available this autumn. There’s no word on pricing, but hopefully it’s cheap because, so far, it seems to be a way to strap your phone to your face with a few apps to play with, something which Google’s Cardboard VR offers for a much lower price.
Source: Oculus
gazzagb
Oculus has certainly had a good year, bought by facebook and now working with Samsung!
camdaz
In principle it sounds good but not sure how useful it will be, especially if it only works with a Samsung phone.
I think I’ll wait for the ‘proper’ Oculus or Sony’s Morpheus.
NotSmartEnough
It’s strange to look back on comments made by Oculus back before they were bought out (‘current gen consoles aren’t powerful enough for VR’) and contrast them with the new position where they’re developing VR for mobile phones!
I guess this is the kind of thing Facebook had in mind and now Carmack, Luckey and co need to follow the party line.