Samsung's Gear VR Is a Portable Oculus Rift for the Galaxy Note 4
theverge.com
theverge.com
I'm facing a flight from Scotland to Australia in December where I'm going to be sat in economy class on a no-frills Air-China flight for god-only-knows how long, and my options to distract myself are currently either read a book on my kindle, or play or watch something on the iPad. I would kill for one of these.
The problems with my existing options are that I can be distracted by seeing people moving around next to me, or I can check my watch absent mindedly, or one of many things might happen that could bring me back into the reality of being sandwiched into a sweaty tin can. Time can pass very slowly when you're travelling.
VR on the other hand completely transports your mind to a place where time isn't really relevant anymore. You need to block out all of your surroundings to really make it work, which means no seeing other passengers get up for toilet breaks, no listening to the engine buzzing along as you read. If I could put this headset on with a decent pair of headphones, and all of a sudden be flying around space in some mobile equivalent of Elite:Dangerous or watching a movie in properly immersive 3D then time would just speed by and my flight wouldn't be so bloody awful.
I've got an Oculus DK2, but I sadly can't lug my beast of a desktop PC on to a flight with me to power it. In terms of being the VR headset of choice for gamers, I'm pretty convinced that Sony will eventually win that battle with their PS4 Project Morpheus headset. This won't compete with either of those two excellent experiences, but I think that as a traveling accessory at least, a wireless headset that uses your phone as a screen could be a god-send.
The Oculus is aimed at high-end PC gamers. I know this because I have a desktop running an i7 3.5GHz quad core processor with 16GB of RAM and a £200 NVIDIA GTX 760 graphics card, and my PC still struggles occasionally to keep frame-rates high enough for VR. And that's just the DK2; expectations are that the consumer version will have a higher resolution and require even more oomph to work. Your average person that plays computer games on a PC is unlikely to have the resources available to commit to that kind of hardware expenditure.
My flatmate for instance plays a lot of games on steam, but they're mostly older games. If he wanted to get an Oculus he'd have to pay £300 for the headset, then another £200 (at least) for a new graphics card, more for a new processor (apparently some of the demos can be quite CPU intensive) and then he'd need to make sure his PSU could cope with all that extra hardware. That's a lot of money up front to make VR work. I should know because I just went through it.
Sony on the other hand has over 10 million PS4's in the wild, all running the same specs, and all with no upgrade path. If Sony can make a VR headset that runs against the PS4 specifications, even at lower graphics levels, then for PS4 owners the road to VR costs whatever Project Morpheus costs, and no more. Lets put it on equal pegging with the Oculus at around £300. That's a much easier sell.
Further to that, people own computers for a whole bunch of reasons. People work on their computers, they code, and they edit videos on them. Being able to play games for them is only part of the value they paid money for. Some people do have PC's purely for games, but I'd be surprised if most people used their PC's primarily for gaming. PS4 owners on the other hand have already shelled out money for a dedicated gaming device. People in that situation (so my theory goes) should be more easily sold on a VR gaming accessory.
The way I see things panning out is this. The Oculus will likely continue to provide the state-of-the-art in VR experience for the real VR fanatics or the hard core PC gamer crowd. They will also probably scoop up a whole bunch of professional users too, in the form of architects or engineers or the like. But the costs of all the peripheral PC equipment you need to make the Oculus a decent experience will see off the "mainstream". In my view, it'll take someone like Sony (or an xbox equivalent) to offer a lesser, but good-enough, product to a large audience of people who are already bought into "gaming" to really make VR a viable and mainstream gaming platform.
I think Sony stand a pretty good chance of "winning" for those reasons.
It's a great product though. If you can afford to upgrade your computer to accommodate it then I can't recommend the experience highly enough. Money well spent in my opinion.
I'd concede that maybe Morpheus will be just good enough to make it work, games can be simplified to run faster, and games can very tuned unlike PC games because it's fixed hardware.
Personally I think any one of the players in the game can just copy any strategy anyone else makes, to a point. Samsung for instance is likely going to be ahead of the game on display technology manufacturing, but who knows I don't have the best handle on the display screen technology race.
Sony has the first party advantage in terms of getting their stuff to look beautiful and artistic at low graphics quality. Games like Journey and tearaway have demonstrated Sony's mastery in this regard. Their gaming ecosystem is first class, a huge advantage over FB and Samsung.
My money is on Sony until the PS5, which is when the 2x4k and 120hz era of VR will begin.
Editing comment to respond to replies in one place instead of individually.
1) The Note 4 is housed inside the Gear VR. Larger battery pack probably won't fit. You will need to carry spare batteries. Possibly the next generation might solve this.
2) I may have missed it, but I didn't see anyway to charge the Note 4 while using the Gear VR. So assuming you do have a charging port, you would need to stop and charge the device. Or carry a spare device to charge your spare battery while you use the Gear VR.
Just to be clear, I am not criticizing the Gear VR. My response was only targeted at the Parent comment's use case. I think it is really cool that Samsung is trying to think out of the box and come up with innovations. Some will stick, some won't. We will see.
In business class and above? Fewer.
It wouldn't have to be wireless (because you're meant to stay in your seat anyway) so that would solve the battery issue, or even simpler to implement: the headset could just have an opening for the power coord and let the user use his own phone coord with the regular power outlet (that way he can choose between wireless or wired based on his battery level & expected usage duration, without having to replace the seats, so that save implementation costs).
As for being brought back to reality, this could be a solution: http://youtu.be/fEiyzJDFiJI
Edit: Oh man, he sure doesn't hold back on the technical lingo.
It is very disorienting if you only have rotational support (as if your head's at the same point in space) and not also positional (head moving forward, backward, up, down, left, right, etc.)
I suppose the obvious one is to use the front-facing camera and some external markers but that might be very CPU-intensive.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Project+Tango+Teardown/23835
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Development+Kit+...
Also if you later can use Google Tango with it, you'd even have both depth + color feeds for AR, not just color, which helps realism when you add 3D elements in it, or even simply to sneak parts of the real world into VR (like in youtu.be/fEiyzJDFiJI).
Natural interactions, realistic rendering, latency (and battery life :) are definitely the next big battlefields.
While the Oculus still looks to be competitively better, seeing the market expand can only be a positive signal for VR.
I've got one and there's quite a few fun demos and small games in the Play Store that work with it.
I assume whatever Oculus helped with was mostly to do with software and/or helping Samsung spec out the sensors used in the phone to give a decent VR experience.