Samsung Gear VR uses a Note 4 plus headset and Oculus software. Interesting stuff. Better than Cardboard, not as good as Rift.

It's an official Oculus project?

Deep shit...

Not to badger my own thread though, but this should be in the VR one...

But yeah...

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/introducing-the-samsung-gear-vr-innovator-edition/

They're going hard at it too. Look at that joypad...

Can conform pad made by company that doesn't make games.

Yeah, I still have a Jag.

We should all be incredibly excited by this. It's a brave thing and I really hope it works. I wanted a Note 4 anyway but this news has made me more certain.

Also I want to see people using it on the bus.

WorKid wrote:

Yup this ain't no Cardboard nonsense. (I've not seen a price yet though!)

That's because it's not a real product yet, it's a beta release.

Was waiting for Gunn's take on it. MORE PLEASE.

The big difference I can see here is in how it's going to be applied...

This thing immediately becomes the best way to watch a film...

I forgot you're a skeptic... In some ways I am too.

You have have to try some of the new tech though... there are some flaws, and this Samsung/Oculus venture won't solve them all, but what it will do, it bring a ton of game developers into an organised line to develop games for a cutting edge controller (it is what it is...) with an open source devkit (or at least a free devkit)...

Some one will develop a must have game for this.

It's like what the Steam Machine was supposed to be...

If this was the differentiating factor on a couple of similar phones, it would make the decision much easier.

At this rate Oculus look worth an unbelievable amount of money and the move by Zuckerburg was a coup of historic standards. I underestimated how fast and smart they'd be with tieing this up. You're thinking a little small, dynamite, the experiences on VR do NOT have to be games, and they dont have to be films, they can be something else entirely - this is the fun, it's not some random peripheral like a Kinect or a Wiimote, it's a new medium for consuming information (like a speaker or a television) and it's the most profound leap into our personal realitys that any medium has taken, if Oculus keep this momentum, and i'm guessing now that Valve etc are probably working with closely over anything else, theyre going to be the engineers of quite something

The mobile market and even entire processing paradigm is somewhat different to pcs, the Samsung device is no way positioned to compete with something like a Steam Machine - for a start a mobile has nothing like the power of a desktop PC, so the type of experiences you could expect from them both may be totally different. On that note, I cannot see Valve not making some strong links between Steam Machine and VR in future, Samsung have just made another big push in getting VR out of the fringe. It's not really like it's a technology that has to worry about uptake, anyone who tries it is either sold or cannot deny its effect or potential, so the main thing now is getting it into the hands of as many people as possible, stop it having this aura of black magic or gizmo or novelty, expel loads of misconceptions that really would vanish upon experiencing it, and get everything moving..

LazyGunn wrote:

At this rate Oculus look worth an unbelievable amount of money and the move by Zuckerburg was a coup of historic standards. I underestimated how fast and smart they'd be with tieing this up. You're thinking a little small, dynamite, the experiences on VR do NOT have to be games, and they dont have to be films, they can be something else entirely - this is the fun, it's not some random peripheral like a Kinect or a Wiimote, it's a new medium for consuming information (like a speaker or a television) and it's the most profound leap into our personal realitys that any medium has taken...

This is the thing Gunn, I don't believe I'm thinking small at all here.

My view is this.

Computers are both incredibly useful, and incredibly complicated.

I think humanity will be better served by an effort to harness and control the bloody things, than to get lost inside the constructs they can process.

Not to say that's what VR is doing, and I will be kopping a Note 4 and that harness. I'll also fuck about with that API... But the Wiimote does appear to illustrate the side of the divide that I support (controlling and harnessing stuff), and the HMD can be said to demonstrate the potential of the other extreme...

That's probably a little more airy than some of the ideas I usually throw around here, but I thought it was kinda' apt to the thread, and wanted to share it.

LazyGunn wrote:

That's like saying Apple doesn't own patents because other people make smartphones. Wat. 2 billion is pocket change compared to the value of the industry it will create over time.

I said significant patents. Maybe they've got dibs on "squint-to-scroll" as it relates to JavaScript but vr is decades old so I'd expect most of the biggies to be taken.

The value of the whole future industry doesn't mean much. Otherwise, $2bn on THQ in the early 90s would've been a great investment.