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Samsung Says It's Taking Some Time Off For Thinking and Waiting To See How the VR Market Shapes Up (xda-developers.com)
Samsung says it is taking some time off to think before creating the next-generation VR headsets. The company said it wants to see the direction the market takes over the next few months and years. The company added that it is satisfied with the progress it has made in the mobile VR space (rightfully so, Samsung is among the frontrunners in VR tech), but it isn't happy with the state of display technology that goes along with the headsets. One solution the company sees right now is 10K displays, but that alone would require $5-10 billion commitment from Samsung. From an article on XDA: Samsung believes display technology needs to advance to at least twice the pixel density that we have in smartphones today. So it looks like the company is waiting and seeing how the experience of a standalone VR headset will be with Ultra HD display panels. Samsung's President & Chief Strategy Officer, Young Sohn, says this could be an incentive for the company to advance the technology faster, but it would cost them at least $5 to $10 billion to do so and develop a 10K mobile display.
Not a bad idea to see how the imminent introduction of Sony shakes up the market and all the other players... and if the vive concept of the VR space you can walk in beats out Chair VR, or even if something like the Hololens comes along with a true consumer version... or even maybe some dark horse comes out of no-where.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Samsung and the rest got burned by 3D TVs and this is turning out to be exactly the same thing.
The tech is expensive and flakey. There aren't nearly enough complete titles to motivate people to buy. VR sickness is still a real problem.
It isn't a wise investment, at this point.
I think they're waiting to see some more solid demand shape up in the "exploding headgear" market space.
Give it few months/years and it will fade away. VR has been around since the 90's and it still hasn't really gained traction.
at this point other than porn?
the only mass market adoption i can see is streaming live events to VR users so i don't have to pay $500 to some scalper to see a concert or a sports event. at this point it's a geek toy i wouldn't spend money on unless it came free with a phone
Having spent a bunch of time with VR, resolution is reasonably far down the list of what I'd fix with the current headsets, and even then I think you'd get most of the benefit out of much more modest increases than this guy seems to want (eg 4k or so). No - what I want is wireless connection to a computer, and more consistency on tracking, latency, and framerate. Also, tracking more objects/body parts/physical room features/etc.. would be great.
But it's also really great right now, even though prime content is still just trickling out. This "oh VR can't be done yet" to me just says that his company wasn't really ready, and wants everyone to wait for them to catch up.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The resolution is more than OK enough for most uses now.
Wireless is really key for truly mass adoption...
That in combination with your noted desire to better represent objects and room features, makes me think that in the end something like the Hololens will ultimately be the form the technology takes. Even though the current implementation is incredibly expensive and has a really narrow field of view... It just brings roomscale stuff from the Vive to a more practical place since you don't have to worry about totally clearing out a large space.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let their competitors sink a lot of money into expensive technology people don't have the money for.
Customers do not react favorably to exploding VR headsets.
As a consumer I'm doing the same thing. Will this take off (as smartphones did) or will this be a fad that- or will it sputter and start to fade after a few years like tablets did?
Currently, the only VR I've tried out was pretty lame and didn't look worth me buying. Maybe if they get good and inexpensive enough I will jump on the bandwagon; or maybe they'll stay crap and I will avoid it. It's potentially exciting technology but I'm not getting overly excited yet.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If it does, they've lost their niche.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Disclosure: My day job some years ago used to be working with VR technologies. 3D environments, headsets, caves, 3D glasses, the works... I'm more familiar than most with the benefits and limitations of VR tech from first hand experience. While the technology has progressed since I worked with it daily, the basic structural limitations of it haven't changed at all.
The problem with VR is that it lacks a killer app or even much in the way of practical use cases. The practical applications of it are rather narrow in scope and scale. Vehicle simulators, some marketing, some entertainment, a limited subset of games, and a few other things. There just isn't that much you can really do with it. Plus it has some physical usability restrictions that further limit its utility given the reasonably foreseeable state of the art for the next 10-20 years. The biggest market for it will probably be certain types of games. Simulators tend towards the expensive end of the spectrum and there will definitely be some utility there. Useful stuff but nothing that is going to be life altering for most of us. Lots of people have visions of a holodeck but VR is something quite different than that.
A much, much, much larger market will be the market for Augmented Reality technology. The applications of AR are too numerous to mention and crude versions of it are already in widespread use. AR is going to be enormous though there is some overlap in the technology between AR and VR so developing for VR isn't necessarily a waste of time as long as one's market expectations for it are rational.
Samsung is simply waiting to see if Hillary is elected; if so it's time to bunker down and stock up on iodine tablets as nuclear exchanges are inevitable...
After all she is the one who wanted to Drone Assange. After Hillary you all will be crying to Bush to come back.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the whole market explodes then how would they differentiate their products?
what I want is wireless connection to a computer, and more consistency on tracking, latency, and framerate.
apparently the latency can be many seconds as long as it's "consistent"
tell us more about your magic wireless technology with "consistent" latency
Also, tracking more objects/body parts/physical room features/etc.. would be great.
yeah, that will do WONDERS for frame rate and latency.
Getting fire to look right in VR is tough.
...they've got some exploding washing machines to sort out.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
tell us more about your magic wireless technology with "consistent" latency
How does the Hololens do such a good job tracking if wireless is such a problem? Hmm???
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suspect they have their lawyers working first to figure out how to get in without stepping on someone else patents and how they could construct their own so they can protect their market.
I am glad Samsung read my slashdot post in April of last year when I announced that a 10K display was required. At the time you guys laughed at it and my calculations. Proof: http://m.slashdot.org/thread/4... I hope this is enough vindication.
You slashdotters did the same in 2005 (nearly two years before the iPhone was released, and 5 years before the first phablet) when I announced that we needed large screen touchscreen phones that too was pooh poohed the same way. http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Anyway back to VR, the other thing needed to be fixed is the refresh rate. 120 Hz is the minimum non-nauseating resolution.
VR... I'm leaning towards this being a non-sustainable flop for now, but it's got more chance of succeeding than 3D TV ever did.
VR will always be something of a niche. There are some genuine use cases for it but they are rather narrow in scope. Primarily they will be in the entertainment industry but even there there are some rather severe limitations. There will be some people who like VR games. Some will perhaps watch sporting events via VR. And there is a market for training simulators. But all these use cases are pretty narrow vertical industries without widespread mass market appeal most likely. I've worked with VR for a living in years past and the reaction was and is always that it is neat stuff but people have a hard time finding space for it in their everyday lives.
A much more important industry will be Augmented Reality (AR) which has orders of magnitude more utility for most people's lives. People use AR already today in many cases albeit in relatively crude forms.
Real VR will only be possible after medical science learns to safely hack and program the human brain.
Having to move around is not virtual reality. Virtual reality will be when input is completely neural. You will sit/lie down and plug yourself into some sort of a device that will display images on an unobtrusive wearable screen or contact lenses, or possibly somehow directly telling your brain what you are seeing if technology advances to such point, while also stimulating areas of your brain to give you sensory feeling thus tricking you into having the sensation of moving and interacting with objects despite the fact that you are completely immobile.
Imagine how crazy it will be when you are about to touch a smooth hard stone surface and thus you expect it to feel a certain way, but instead it will feel like a liquid or foam or have the properties of a completely different thing. VR will be a completely new realm of possibilities and a total mind rape. :)
Of course, that is still a long way off.
boom
kim jong-un: Fire all missles, all nukes!!! Oh Boy! We have the BEST VR in the world! Officer: Ummm Most Honored Leader *wide eyed* This is not real VR, we just cut a window in a box! kim jong-un: Hmmm time for lunch, bring me a peasant, I'm hungry!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
When there are interactions with real life structures, there is noticable stutter
Not that I saw, the tracking of virtual objects on tables (for instance) was excellent, as was tracking within a wholly 3D scene. It was as good as the Vive.
Yes it has a more limited field of view (at the moment) but the fundamental tech shows that wireless can work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree. The question I'm usually answering is "how much did all this cost?" (and I'm in Canada) - but you could certainly go lower budget and still have something cool.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Remember how Samsung chickened out of the OLED TV market, claiming that those would just be "too expensive" to become a market success? Well, turned out that LG was capable of building and selling OLED TVs at reasonable prices.
So now they are using the same kind of argument to stop their VR ambitions. Their competitors will love it.
Seems that Samsung's company strategy today is "Innovation just cost us money!"
Hey Samsung, thanks for giving the finger to everyone who bought in to the GearVR.. that's what this really means.
When will your phones not be compatible with the original GearVR headsets? the S9? Or the S8?
You need to integrate your smartwatch as a VR interaction device and really take the lead, instead you're just going to "watch" ??
If I kept making shit that blows up or catches fire[1] I'd probably take a timeout too.
[1] Unless I owned a match factory or on armaments company, of course.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We are going to wait and copy what Apple does.
Being overly negative here, but this might just be how VR dies...
Honestly, I think VR was overestimated by too many companies, but this was the chance of it going big. :P
It's a hard concept to sell, and I still consider it a highly niche thing, but I wouldn't mind having games and content produced for it, and the concept getting successful to a point that I could actually afford it.
The problem is that if big companies starts hitting the brakes now, waiting to see how the market will react to VR, it's just too soon and underdeveloped.
VR seems to be a slow moving thing that would take a lot of time reaching all the people it could potentially sell to. Big companies should be looking at this as a long term investment that might give results in the long run, not a year from launch date.
I'd imagine it would take at least a couple of years or more after the first units were released for the potential market to even get in contact with it, let alone for worthwhile exclusive content to be released for it.
I gotta admit that I was never a huge VR proponent... AR just looks more attractive to me as an idea.
But I was hoping that with these many companies involved, we'd perhaps have more push and attempts on digging hard on the idea. If Samsung is taking a step back, other companies might follow suit, we'd end up in a standstill, and then there will be no more VR for a very long time because of that burn.
Let's see of what Google has to show tomorrow reverses things.
Putting a 'bag' over your to pretend you are in a different world doesn't really make a game or entertainment more enjoyable.
IMAX and HD theaters do a very good job bring you into other worlds - yet increasingly people are preferring the convenience of watching stuff on their smart phones - with augmented reality like Pokemon Go sort of mixing things up a bit, but still its and app on your phone that happens to be mobile x connected x GPU enabled.
A good FPS on an XBOX / Playstation / Steam PC sitting on couch with chat headset is incredibly immersive and no 3D goggles are needed.
According to recent advances in Samsung technology, its VR headset should give super realistic experience when being shot in FPS games
I disagree. VR lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't. It lets you meet people there, allows you to create your own environments and play.
I'm well aware of what it does. I'm also (unlike many) well aware of what it does not do. What it does not do is actually put people in the location as if they were actually there. VR is in reality a form of a fancy monitor. It allows you to look around rather than having a fixed viewpoint. Useful at times but not nearly as often as VR enthusiasts imagine.
You know what else lets you view objects and visit places whether they exist or don't? A television. Sure you cannot look around but it does a good enough job for most practical use cases. Picture something like Google Streetmaps. I can look around in the monitor to get the information I need. Strapping into an immersive headset would provide minimal additional information but considerably add to the cost and complexity. The ability to look a different direction just by moving my head versus pushing a few buttons does not add a lot of value for most use cases.
The ONLY people who are going to "create their own environment and play" will be the same people who find making 3D shooter game levels fun. You know, the sort people who spend ludicrous amounts of time building something outrageously impractical in Minecraft. The rest of us won't bother.
You can preview your hotel room, visit Mars, sit in a car with custom configuration or walk in your restyled home. You can draw and animate intuitively or meet a friend for a round of Ping Pong, wherever he lives.
You are making the same mistake most enthusiasts do when musing on the potential of VR. You think about all these cool ideas without considering the the reality of how to apply VR to the actual task and whether people would find any actual real world benefit in doing so. VR will be used for things like what you describe but what you are missing is that it won't be used much for any of them. The marginal benefit of the ability to look around versus having a fixed view point in most cases is incredibly small. You could make the headset and computer running it darn near free and the use cases STILL won't make much economic or practical sense for all but a hand full of rare and usually expensive corner cases.
The amount of added benefit from looking at some well rendered drawings versus doing a VR walkthrough is smaller than you imagine. I know because I've done that exact thing in an industrial setting. My department at a former job used to do 3D mockups of proposed factories and offices and allow people to walk through them using VR headsets and 3D projections. I built the models and the 3D environments. At the end of the day it cost a substantial amount of money for something that, while impressive, didn't have any real world benefit over just some 2D paper drawings and a few renderings. It simply added cost and ended up being nothing more than an overly expensive gee-wiz marketing toy.
Nobody is going to bother looking at a hotel room with a VR headset because it's just not that important of a decision. The number of people who buy heavily customized cars where a VR headset would actually provide added utility is a vanishingly small number. Most people buy standardized cars with a few options that they don't need a virtual environment to visualize and that isn't going to change. Visit "Mars"? Sure, at the museum but most people are going to get bored by "walking" around a desert planet faster than you will believe. Think about walking around an empty online multiplayer game and picture how long that will hold the attention of most people. "Meet a friend for a round of ping pong"? This isn't a holodeck my friend. It doesn't work like that.
I'm not saying VR has no utility but rather that the promise of VR has been overblown literally for decades now. It's not going to change the world. It will be a very useful and relatively cool niche technology. Augmented Reality however WILL change the world and has immediate and widespread applications in almost everyone's lives.
I am working as both researcher and developer in this field for almost two decades. There certainly isn't a "lack of a killer app" there.
A killer app is one that drives mass adoption of a technology. Something that makes people who previously never were interested in the technology to need to have it. VR has no killer app or at least no one has come up with one to date. Spreadsheets were what drove people to adopt personal computers in the workplace. That was a killer app. VR has nothing like that that is going to put it in the hands of the every day person.
However, there is one big difference - I am talking about professional market. Simulators & marketing are one thing
We've had those for years and they are the very definition of niche uses. Simulators are expensive and only make senses when damaging the real world object you are simulating is orders of magnitude more expensive. Most simulators don't in actuality require VR either nor would they be improved by having it.
Then you have training applications - machine operators, surgery training, maintenance training, safety procedures, dangerous materials handling, you name it. Of course, military training too, even though that is a complete different market.
Have you actually tried to train people using VR? I have. With a few rare exceptions there almost always is a more cost effective and practical way to train people than with VR. It's really hard and expensive to make adequately realistic and more importantly adequately useful VR training environments. Probably the best use case is for high risk surgeries and I've seen doctors using it for that exact purpose. For stuff like machine operators VR is in general a terrible way to train them outside of some rare corner cases.
Concerning AR - I am not that sure. For one, AR is very overrated.
You think AR is overrated but VR isn't? I think you aren't seeing the forest for the trees. The use cases for AR are incredibly obvious and plentiful. Far more so than for VR. You discuss a host of practical obstacles to AR headsets which are all very real engineering challenges but you seem to be limiting yourself to a version of AR that requires some sort of portable head set. No head set is required. AR for example could be integrated into a car. Imagine your car projecting your intended route as an overlay on your windshield with annotations. That is AR and none of your engineering concerns (fragility, tracking, battery life...) apply because the environment is the car around you. You can do very practical versions of AR in a smartphone. For a simple example Pokemon Go is a crude form of AR. This notion that you have to engineer some ridiculously complicated version of a portable headset to make practical use of AR technology is misguided. The mass market applications of it will start with smartphones and automobiles and go from there.
* There is AR and "AR". Google Glass was not AR but a personal HUD - if there is no registration between the image overlay and the real world, *it is not AR*. Glass was incapable of that.
I didn't bring up Google Glass nor did I describe it as AR. I could see AR applications for something like Google Glass but the device isn't AR any more than an immersive headset is VR. AR and VR are systems of technology.
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