While Oculus and Sony both continue their development on their own VR headsets, Samsung is poised to unveil and launch their own product at the upcoming IFA conference in September. The device will be named Gear VR, as if anyone thought it could be anything different, and as we stated before it’s an accessory that Samsung is developing for use with smartphones for things like games and other apps to provide a mobile VR experience to the user. The differences here between Gear VR and the two other big name projects we’ve heard about over the past year from the two companies above, is that Samsung’s headset is targeting mobile customers for use with their handsets, and both Facebook owned Oculus and Sony are targeting more of a PC and console gamer crowd. Sony with the PS4 and Oculus with presumably PC and consoles.
The Gear VR headset is said to be getting the announcement in pair with Samsung’s next big flagship device for the year, the Galaxy Note 4. Some other interesting bits of information we came across the last time we talked about Samsung’s VR headset, is that Oculus and Samsung are actually in partnership with this device. Since neither are working on a product that will directly compete with each other, Oculus had agreed to provide the VR technology to Samsung for the software side while Samsung handles the hardware. Samsung’s headset also isn’t a complete VR headset makeup separate from all other equipment like both the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus, it actually has a placeholder for your phone to dock into it, and it connects using the USB 3.0 standard connection.
Gear VR will utilize the hardware from a users phone to track the motion of a persons head which is how it is able to re-create a three-dimensional virtual reality experience for the user. A slew of Samsung apps should be expected to be available for the device and be compatible, but Samsung is making the SDK for Gear VR open to developers, so we can expect third party offerings as well and not just those from Samsung themselves. No pricing details have been listed yet but we’d expect since this is geared towards mobile that a good guess would lead us to believe we might see this cost anywhere between $200 and $400. It will have to be somewhat affordable if Samsung hopes to capture a percentage of the consumers that are interested in VR.
