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

In light of recent news coverage...

[jeffb (2.718)]

I think they're waiting to see some more solid demand shape up in the "exploding headgear" market space.

Re:In light of recent news coverage...

[jeffb (2.718)]

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...

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.

Re:Samsung is waiting

[Oswald McWeany]

If it does, they've lost their niche.

Limitations of VR

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Limitations of VR

[janoc]

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. However, there is one big difference - I am talking about professional market. Simulators & marketing are one thing (even though those rarely focus on HMDs but rather on projected displays - HMD is cumbersome).

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.

Another category I have been involved with are various medical therapy applications - psychology and psychiatry - e.g. various phobias, even additiction therapies, PTSD is successfully being treated using VR, pain distraction applications (e.g. for severely burned people, dentists or some cancer sufferers).

And those are just the domains I have been somehow involved with or seen around me. Retail/consumer market is a different story and there I see VR mostly as niche within the larger gaming/entertainment market. Things like 360 videos and watching TV using HMDs will likely fail as that is pretty much pointless and the novelty of it fades very quickly.

Concerning AR - I am not that sure. For one, AR is very overrated. The AR applications are perhaps numerous in movies and Hollywood (everyone wants a Terminator-like HUD, right?!), but not in reality. Stupid stuff like superheroes jumping out of cereal boxes were interesting perhaps 5 years ago. There are also numerous problems that would have to be overcome first and not all of them are technical ones.

* 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.

* Contrast - optical see-through displays have inherently poor contrast and daylight visibility, digital see-through (using cameras) tend to suffer from lag, motion blur and poor dynamic range (big issue outdoors in sunlight, for ex.)

* Fragility - most AR displays are very fragile pieces of glass and electronics, not robust to day to day abuse. Can be solved, but at the expense of aesthetics and price.

* There is *no* robust tracking soluton for AR that would work both indoors and outdoors, have sufficient accuracy for registering overlays over objects beyond simplistic labels (think satnav instructions) and would not require enormous computational power. Projects like Tango are getting close, but still no cigar. This is actually *THE* problem we are fighting almost every week at work when clients ask for an AR application - nobody wants markers, but pretty much nothing else works with sufficient accuracy and low overhead.

* Battery life - AR needs to be mobile to be really useful which means batteries. Something iike Tango running full tilt tracking and displaying of the 3D scene would likely run out of battery within an hour or two. Or shut off due to overheating because of the heavy computation going on (see the GearVR problems with that - and GearVR is not doing any tracking at all).

And now the non-technical issues which could be the largest problem, in fact:
* Most people don't want to look like Borgs from StarTrek wearing headsets. Not an issue in the pro market, but enormous problem for consumer market. Google has learned that firsthand with their Glass.

* We are far from headsets being socially acceptable. Both the cameras and the lack of eye contact/apperance of being distracted are an issue. Perhaps this will change as these devices become pervasive (talking on a phone in public used to be a social no-no too), but until then it will be a major hurdle for adoption.

Re:Limitations of VR

[janoc]

I did and I am following the project from the start.

It is an interesting idea and innovative approach to how to produce 3D images. I wouldn't actually call it AR, it is more a general mixed reality setup, because it doesn't really attempt to overlay registered virtual image over the real world - it displays computer generated imagery over a specially prepared surface (the retroreflective foil).

I think it will be interesting novelty item for the entertainment, but probably not all that big there. It depends a lot on what kind of content will be available. Also CastAR needs the multiplayer games to really shine - similar to what made Wii popular. The games were basic, but it was fun playing with friends in the same space. That is both a boon and a bane - how many gamers actually have someone to play together with next to them all the time?

Where there is a much bigger potential for that technology is the professional market - it is one of the very few technologies that is capable of displaying proper multi-user stereo in the same shared space. E.g. CAVEs that are able to do so can typically handle 2 simultaneous users max and cost millions. CastAR can handle 4 simultaneous users in the same space at least and costs a few orders of magnitude less ... This is huge for collaborative applications, such as planning, design review, training, etc. I think that is where it will be flying off the shelves because there simply isn't a system with comparable capability for a similar price on the market.

Re:WTF is the point of VR?

[kuzb]

I think this is exactly right. The problem with VR right now isn't the technology - it's the fact that all the major players are trying to come out with a premium product that nobody can afford. This is why it will ultimately fail.

It's sort of like games on Linux in this respect. Developers need to create the software, and if the sales of the software don't follow they'll feel burned and won't invest effort in to it the next time.