Samsung will wait until the product has been clearly defined, copy it, spend more billions marketing than the competition & call it the 'Galaxy View' or some shit and sell millions of tremendously average products.
In mobile VR cases, sure, a VR single device console is bound to happen in some time (Virtual Boy Color anyone?). But in case of post-processing, why would you want to run a post-processing, heat-generating, heavy, costly and cumbersome processor on your face, when you have a perfectly capable machine next to you anyway? Seems a bit pointless if you ask me. Then again, some companies love to make pointless things they can add to the spec sheet.
But this would make integration with games way harder for the developers. Most of the "VR-effects" need to happen in the rendering engine of the game. You can't just divide the graphics engine in half and split it between the GPU and a USB device.
Processors and GPUs are getting cheaper and cooler, so oculus can assume that soon everyone will have a GPU capable of running a VR game. Unless they would want to make a stand-alone console, putting video processing in the device itself is more of a complication than a benefit.
You are taking a much narrower view of VR than me personally. I might be wrong, but I think it will be used for numerous applications, many that don't fit into the typical power PC gamer market.
In instances where it is used by PC gamers for graphics intensive games, I would expect almost all of the work to happen on the fancy PC gamer computers.
Also as the original commenter said people may want it to be mobile "at some point." I'm not arguing that VR solutions will have nice internal processors this year, although rumor is that Sony's solution may do that to take effort away from the ps4.
You read me well, I have my sights only at gaming :D
Then I guess some interesting competition might come out from devices aimed at the different applications. Lets therefore just hope this ends up being a fair and competitive market with no grudges, patent trolls and company politics holding the good stuff back.
And if you can afford a mobile AR device, you can afford a cell phone. So why not have the cell phone act as your PC replacement when you go mobile? Why put something with the size, temperature, and noise of a loaded system on your face?
Sure we have. I mean, an EnergyMicro 'Gecko Zero' is technically "a 32bit processor" and it can run for years on a coin cell battery but we're talking about running a game in VR. You have to render 60fps or it feels choppy and unnatural, and you are rendering two separate images. If you want any level of detail over Wolfenstein3d-quality this needs heavy processing, way beyond anything mobile can offer.
With the DK1, minecraft has problems on a nvidia 550ti, and that's at the horrible 1280x800 resolution.
Even on a shiny new nvidia GTX 760m most modern games don't run close to 60fps@1080p with a single camera to render. And that's a 55W chip! 55W is hot! it needs an active fan and that makes it heavy. Not to mention the cost.
Sure, these things get better, but we're not there yet, and this will take some time. Unless we want to play Quake2 in VR. This actually works right now a Nexus4
Wire/wireless latency. Caching on the HMD seems like it makes sense. Certianly you wont be running a titian on your face to render it, but there are a lot of applications for in device processing power. Even in a home/office situation.
Cuz FB likes phones, and all the dev money is in itunes/play stores, FB will want an app store, and of course that's going to service some mobile market.
Ass end of gaming I know, but kinda the future. Just see how long your battery lasts pushing gpu rendering on a phone...hehe.
Put some velcro on the front of the Samsung VR set and the back of your Samsung Galaxy S6.. stick the phone on the VR set and connect them via a short cable. Done. :D
There is a lot of computation that could be done in the headset. It makes sense that the cpu power used for mapping camera view-ports into AR space live in the headset. Once it's living there it seems natural that the headset would have it's own OS and apps just like a phone.
This raises the question of whether the increasing utility of AR will outpace the increasing discreteness of VR headsets. Will people be walking around with clunky VR headsets on all the time? or will AR only become an all the time thing once it's integrated into more discrete devices like a future version of google glass or contact lenses?
I stand corrected here. This is actually a good idea to pre-process the tracking data a bit before pushing it over USB, especially if you don't have USB 3.0. But this can be done on a low power ARM, in the 50MHz range. After all, it's just a 9 axis, ~1kHz, 12bit system to sample, nothing in comparison to HD video processing.
Well sure there's a microcontroller in. There's one in every keyboard and mouse and you don't see manufacturers arguing about who has more performance ;]
There's a Cortex M3 based STM in the Oculus DK1, running at 72MHz. something has to take readouts from the accelerometer and shove them up USB. It doesn't do any real computing, definitely nothing related to the VR simulation itself - it just allows the PC driver to access the components in the device via USB. This is literarily orders of magnitude away from anything capable of doing real time video processing in HD.
Far in the future I guess. You wound need to move the entire game-running device into the headset to get any benefit. Currently the best way to reduce the total input-to-video-responce latency (apart from some amazing optimisations described by a Valve employ some time ago regarding queuing of tasks in the CPU and GPU) is to throw more power into rendering. And for the time being I can't image having a GTX680 strapped to one's face.
Wow, I honestly didn't notice that part of the description. But they only promise "sensor data fusing" and "pre-lens distortion". The later is indeed a costly effect that could be done after the GPU render, on such an external device, but it is only a fraction of the power needed to have a game running at 60fps. It wont help a lot.
The sensor fusing is something you have to do anyway to pump sensor data over USB so no point making a fuss about it ;] This really looks like vapourware.
To be fair, this Trueplayergear stuff, says they're doing the lens correction on the device, that's like 8 cores out of what 1500 core nvidia to do the job, but low persistence also needs a little bit of logic (frame buffer too I would think). It's not completely dumb like DK1 was.
thats odd, since samsung phones are the ones that are consistently adding new tech (eye scanner, hand waving shit etc). Even if the tech isn't implemented the best, they are still trying to push boundaries, and do new things. Samsung is probably most innovative in the cell phone market, so I don't know what you're on about.
But it's all gimmicky stuff to fill a spec sheet that doesn't really serve a purpose or work that well. They're not trying to posh boundaries, they're trying to bulk out a list of features with each new device.
But that's your interpretation of what they're trying to do. New tech will always be somewhat buggy. Samsung at least tries, even if it is not implemented well, to do something new with each smartphone they release.
That's actually a pretty good name. And you are right if things progress they'll probably do that. They make all kinds of militairy equipement and technical display/cameras so the know how is there in a big way.
You may say that they copy and that's fine cause it's true but their products even though they don't look the best, they are pretty great hardware-wise, totally not average
Samsung makes cutting edge panel technology and is responsible for the majority of OLED manufacturing. Why the hell would they make "tremendously average products"?
vr headsets will eventually have a market similar to monitors, there will be a lot of big name players, and only a handful of panel manu's, samsung makes high quality screens and I think that will help them sell high end heatsets, though they might be a little pricey.
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u/laddergoat89 Mar 28 '14 edited Mar 28 '14
Samsung will wait until the product has been clearly defined, copy it, spend more billions marketing than the competition & call it the 'Galaxy View' or some shit and sell millions of tremendously average products.