You know what this is going to be great for? Travelling.<p>I'm facing a flight from Scotland to Australia in December where I'm going to be sat in economy class on a no-frills Air-China flight for god-only-knows how long, and my options to distract myself are currently either read a book on my kindle, or play or watch something on the iPad. I would kill for one of these.<p>The problems with my existing options are that I can be distracted by seeing people moving around next to me, or I can check my watch absent mindedly, or one of many things might happen that could bring me back into the reality of being sandwiched into a sweaty tin can. Time can pass very slowly when you're travelling.<p>VR on the other hand completely transports your mind to a place where time isn't really relevant anymore. You need to block out all of your surroundings to really make it work, which means no seeing other passengers get up for toilet breaks, no listening to the engine buzzing along as you read. If I could put this headset on with a decent pair of headphones, and all of a sudden be flying around space in some mobile equivalent of Elite:Dangerous or watching a movie in properly immersive 3D then time would just speed by and my flight wouldn't be so bloody awful.<p>I've got an Oculus DK2, but I sadly can't lug my beast of a desktop PC on to a flight with me to power it. In terms of being the VR headset of choice for gamers, I'm pretty convinced that Sony will eventually win that battle with their PS4 Project Morpheus headset. This won't compete with either of those two excellent experiences, but I think that as a traveling accessory at least, a wireless headset that uses your phone as a screen could be a god-send.
Their presentation, featuring John Carmack at 1:32:45.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRLy0QQI6xU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRLy0QQI6xU</a>
It doesn't appear to have positional sensors (the Oculus DK2 does, with a stationary dongle to compare your relative head movements).<p>It is very disorienting if you only have rotational support (as if your head's at the same point in space) and not also positional (head moving forward, backward, up, down, left, right, etc.)
A teardown last year showed the Oculus DK2 was using a Galaxy Note 3 as its screen system [0]. Being able to pull the phone out seems like a logical enough step. Though I wonder how much of the 'other stuff' like positional sensors etc they decide to include.<p><a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Development+Kit+2+Teardown/27613" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Development+Kit+...</a>
If you can use the mobile's back camera like Structure Sensor does, it could even choose between VR and AR based on the app :)<p>Also if you later can use Google Tango with it, you'd even have both depth + color feeds for AR, not just color, which helps realism when you add 3D elements in it, or even simply to sneak parts of the real world into VR (like in youtu.be/fEiyzJDFiJI).<p>Natural interactions, realistic rendering, latency (and battery life :) are definitely the next big battlefields.
Before graphics cards were standard, very few games supported them. Eventually more and more games started supporting specific cards, and then people started buying the cards. Today virtually all games support them, and if you have a gaming PC, you have a card.<p>While the Oculus still looks to be competitively better, seeing the market expand can only be a positive signal for VR.
In case people have forgotten there are many similar DIY solutions based on this: <a href="https://cardboard.withgoogle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cardboard.withgoogle.com/</a><p>I've got one and there's quite a few fun demos and small games in the Play Store that work with it.
Did anyone see the bloomberg coverage of the event? Completely whacky, it's all about how Samsung is fake launching stuff to get ahead of apple without talking about VR at all. Sooo weird, it just goes to show how far the media has its ass stuck up its head sometimes.