VR just got democratized from both ends at once. Back in June, Google handed everyone at I/O a folded piece of cardboard with two lenses that turns your phone into a VR headset for pocket change. Now Samsung has announced Gear VR, built with Oculus, that slots a Galaxy phone into a proper headset shell. Two companies, two very different price points, same fundamental insight: your smartphone is already most of a VR machine.
The phone is the headset
A modern phone has a sharp display, motion sensors, and a fast chip, which covers most of what a VR headset actually needs. Cardboard makes it nearly free and a bit janky. Gear VR makes it polished and untethered. Neither matches a PC-tethered Rift for fidelity, but both put virtual reality in the hands of people who would never buy a dedicated headset, and that is not nothing.
The trend for the year ahead
Mobile VR is how most people will first try virtual reality. Expect a flood of phone-powered headsets, and expect the real scramble to be working out what you actually do in them beyond the roller-coaster demo. The content problem is now the urgent one.
Cardboard is a brilliant Trojan horse. Gear VR is the more serious argument. The fact that a phone is doing the heavy lifting in both cases is the tell: the chip in your pocket is where the real platform battle is heading, and Qualcomm’s silicon is already powering the Gear VR experience.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.