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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.
Perhaps you missed last week's reports of exploding washing machines. Entirely unrelated to the phone-battery problem, of course, but the last thing a large consumer-goods manufacturer needs is another reason for people to post dumb jokes about them on social media...
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.