When the Oculus Rift was first announced, it was seen as a highly creative idea and something with the potential to revolutionize the gaming market very easily. At the same time, the device didn’t arrive as quickly as people were hoping, and after a while other companies started coming out with their own unique solutions to the same problem, addressing all sorts of issues that had come up and making promises of their own. In the end, it got to the point where the Oculus Rift was facing the possibility of becoming irrelevant quite fast.
And while the company seems to be standing on its own feet relatively nicely thanks to a major acquisition that they went through, others are catching up fast themselves and it looks like it’s going to be an interesting battle with lots of challenges for everyone involved.
Samsung Gear VR is among the main challengers to this product, and the device looks like it’s going to be a serious player in the VR market if Samsung play their cards right in the long run. The Gear VR has several benefits compared to other similar devices, such as the fact that it doesn’t require any computer and it can actually offer a very flexible approach to the idea of VR. The device is said to be the first successful attempt at bringing something like this to the mass market, and Samsung have apparently done quite well with this release.
The only problem with the Gear VR is actually a very real one though, and it’s that the device requires the user to also use a Samsung phone. Not everyone has a smartphone by the company and not everyone wants to get one either, so this is going to limit their market exposure by some degree.
But it doesn’t look like Samsung are trying to become a mass player on the VR market in any way, but rather the company is aiming to give their own fans something nice to enjoy, and they’ve been doing that quite successfully with the Gear VR. The device has already seen positive responses within the Samsung fan community, and people love to talk about the company’s approach to the idea.
In the meantime, nobody knows for sure what’s going on with the Oculus Rift and what exactly the company is planning to do with the device. Facebook could easily take it in a questionable direction, but they most definitely understand the importance of the brand name that they’ve acquired, so they aren’t going to make such a colossal mistake. After all, the company has been trying to expand their business in new directions all the time, and they currently have the possibility to get their foot in a great new market, so they aren’t going to jeopardize that chance in any significant way. Although it’s hard to tell what will happen in the long run as it’s possible that Facebook could make some wrong moves.
The VR market is just starting to take off the ground, and we’re going to see various interesting ideas in it in the future. People have been coming up with all sorts of creative solutions for VR products, and this is just the beginning. This could easily become the next big thing not just in gaming, but in personal computing as a whole, and we’re very likely going to see some even more unusual and amazing ideas in the future.
Arash, I do hope you realize that the Samsung Gear VR is NOT competition for the Oculus Rift; on the contrary, it is a joint venture between Samsung and OculusVR, and that is why it says “Oculus” on every Gear VR. Samsung has built the hardware, working hand-in-hand with OculusVR, and OculusVR has developed the software which drives the entire process; and every User enters through the Oculus Store for all of their purchases of software, just as all of the Oculus Rift owners will. And this Oculus Store for both the Gear VR and the Oculus Rift, is where OculusVR will finally start making money off of all of their hardware and software designs. So the Gear VR is like the untethered version of an Oculus Rift; and OculusVR is making more money on every unit sold than Samsung is, due the software sales in the Oculus Store. Will Hart
Saying that Oculus is “competing” with the other VR hardware producers is a little misleading; These companies have actually been going out of their way to share tech and help each other develop better hardware, because the more people who catch on to VR and the more impressive it all is when it first hits the consumer market, the more they ALL win. Presumably, in the end they will each target completely different markets and focus on different needs or specialized applications.
Any REAL competition won’t start until after the technology has reached wide-scale adoption (and Facebook is poised to capitalize on it whether you’re using an Oculus or someone else’s HMD)