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.

Comments

Re:WTF is the point of VR?

[JMZero]

The only reason that VR isn't already a huge mainstream success is price. I've shown Vive games to probably 50 people; a few have since bought one, and pretty much everyone else was blown away... but don't have $3000 sitting around to set one up. Even people who aren't into gaming are often hard to get out of creative stuff like Tilt Brush, or just the experience of being somewhere else. If anything, lots of these things are even more potent to non-geeks who haven't acclimatized to 3d graphics for 20 years. Shooting a zombie in VR is intense; it's even more intense if you haven't played 100 hours of Left 4 Dead and what not.

One of the challenges VR will have over the next year or so is the proliferation of terrible pseudo-VR experiences. Like, I've talked to a few people online who write the whole thing off because they tried some GearVR plastic cell phone box, and those are pointlessly terrible. But eventually there'll be enough good stuff around that this conversation we're having now will disappear. A proper VR setup very quickly explains itself to anyone who tries it. And when such a setup is cheap (which it will be in a couple years), it'll be something that is very widespread, and will replace a good chunk of current TV, movie, and game content.