Oculus VR may indeed have its very own virtual reality headset on the market in the form of Oculus Rift, but that doesn’t mean the Facebook-owned company doesn’t want this new tech to succeed if it doesn’t directly make money from it. As a matter of fact, Oculus teamed up with Samsung in order to ennoble the selection of quality content on Samsung’s own VR headset, the Samsung Gear VR.
One of the first products of that partnership comes in the fact of a virtual reality documentary “Nomads” which can be viewed on Samsung’s hi-tech gadget as of today. The movie was produced by a Canadian VR studio Felix & Paul which is led by renowned film directors Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. “Nomads” revolves around the lives of people located all around the globe. It takes place in Mongolia, Kenya, and the island of Borneo in the Malay Archipelago, and follows the lives of several yak herders as well as members of the Maasai and Bajau tribes. It’s 36 minutes long and consists of three equally long chapters. The first chapter of the said documentary originally debuted at this year’s Sundance film festival where it was met with a generally positive response, with many critics and other viewers describing it as “inspiring”, “intriguing”, and “well-filmed”. Moreover, the second chapter of “Nomads” was screened at the last Tribeca Film Festival and was invoked a similar response from the audience. As of today, the entire documentary is available for viewing on Samsung Gear GR.
Virtual reality technology, in general, is apparently gaining a lot of traction as Oculus revealed that over a million people have used the Samsung Gear VR this April and it’s very own Oculus Rift is also apparently doing quite well, though we’re still waiting for some current figures to back that claim. As for Nomad, it’s not only significant because it’s a well-made VR documentary, but also because it’s the first actually creative VR project from the Felix & Paul studio which has so far only produced promotional content for Oculus. The Facebook-owned company has also announced that we can expect much more similarly cool content for our headsets in the very near future.