The Oculus Rift is an awesome virtual reality headset. Google Cardboard is an awesome one too. But what if you could have the best of both? Simple and high-tech all at once. That's Samsung's Gear VR. You can probably do the math for how cool that is. (It's awesome.)
What Is It?
An official Oculus-branded virtual reality headset that's powered by the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. You literally fit it inside. A bulkier, cushier, more
serious version of Google Cardboard. A mobile VR headset with no wires
required. An "innovator edition," which is to say a tool for developers,
not a completely polished retail product. Freakin' neat.
Why Does It Matter?
After decades, virtual reality is on the verge of being a real and real cool thing (depending on who you ask). The Oculus Rift
is the not-so-far-off pinnacle of the technology, but phone-based VR
headsets are also pretty dope. If you've already got a high-res
supercomputer in your pocket, why not turn it into a VR experience too?
It's a potentially easier way for virtual reality to go mainstream than
pairing a dedicated headset with a beefy gaming PC. It's also available today. With Gear VR, Samsung and Oculus are putting their best foot forward.
Design
Gear VR is simple. So simple that it's almost anticlimactic to pull it
out of the box. It's just a big plastic headset for your phone. It's got
padding for your faceparts, and headstraps that go both around the back
and over the top. Without a Note 4 in place it's remarkably empty
looking. It just gawks at you with its big cartoony owl-eye lenses. "You are going to look so dumb when you put me on your face," it whispers. In your heart you know it's right but you don't care.
Gear VR is a little more than just a big, plastic, cushioned
Google Cardboard, though; there's a special Oculus tracker inside to
help keep your bearing. It's got a touchpad
and back button on the side, which lets you have some rudimentary
controls without having to pair a Bluetooth controller every time you
want to go VR-ing. (Samsung has a controller, but it's not bundled with
Gear VR and everything about the VR interface is designed to be used
without one.)
The headset's also got some volume buttons, and a handy little
proximity sensor on the inside that automatically turns on the screen
and boots into the Oculus app when you put it on, and puts it to sleep
when you rip it off. And on top, there's a little focus wheel that
pushes and pulls the Note 4 screen towards and away from your face to
focus. It's way easier to adjust to your eyes than the Rift developer
kits.
Then there's the front. This is where you snap in your Note 4 and only
your Note 4, and since the Gear VR has been designed so very
specifically with this one handset in mind, the fit is like Cinderella's
foot in a glass slipper. It's easy and satisfying to click it into
place.
On the one end, there's a little microUSB nub that plugs into the
bottom of the Note 4 to make the touchpad, back button and volume
control work—it doesn't charge your phone. On the other side there's a
little doodad that secures the device. It's simple and gets the job done.
It's worth noting here that while Samsung has pointedly said that you're not supposed to try and fit the Galaxy Note Edge
in here, you totally can. I mean, it doesn't "fit" in the conventional
sense, but I've crammed it in a few times without breaking anything
(yet). The problem is that the Note Edge doesn't launch the Oculus app
when you plug it in. I'm sure there's probably some workaround but it
probably involves black magic. Or at least root access.
The finishing touch is a reflective little shield that snaps onto the
outside, over the phone. It's completely cosmetic and I barely ever used
it, but it's there if you want to look a little more like Kid Vid, or
if you don't want to advertise that you literally have a phone strapped
to your face.
Using It
Setup is both simple and annoying. All you have to do is snap the phone
into the the headset, lift it up to your face and you're off to the
races. Well, kind of. Doing so will prompt you to download
a ton of stuff. In my case it was an OS update, then the Oculus app,
then more stuff inside the Oculus app. The whole process took about an
hour. Fortunately Gear VR comes with a microSD card that has all the
huge 4K panoramas and 360 videos pre-loaded so you don't have to spend
the rest of your life waiting for fun stuff to download.
Packed in you get some stuff like extremely hi-res panoramas of Mars
and the bottom of the ocean and major cities, even a few spots in
Chernobyl. Also there are some 360 videos that take you over New Zealand
and New York City, and there's a 3D-rendered ad Samsung did for the
World Cup. Though the Note 4 is a powerful phone, it'll never be able to
replicate the horsepower of a gaming PC. So Gear VR is sort of aimed at
watching videos and looking at photos and lighter fare than exploring
the galaxy in a gunship like
Elite Dangerous, and Samsung's pack-in media reflects that.
It also
reflects a bigger problem with Gear VR right now: Watching videos and
looking at pictures and playing simple phone-type games is fun for 20-30
minutes of amusement, but it's nothing that will suck you in like a
10-12 hour game will, and there aren't really any of those yet. It's an
effect that sometimes makes Gear VR feel more like a really bad-ass
Viewmaster than a true VR headset; the same way Google Cardboard is fun
for a burst but not for hours.
When you first slap Gear VR on after everything's loaded up, you'll get
dropped into the Oculus Home hub. Basically it's just a series of
panels that float in front of you in some boundless blue expanse.
You use the Gear's touchpad to swipe between pages of app icons, and
select things by looking at them and tapping. It's a convenient and
intuitive way to get around without requiring a gamepad. If you want to
let someone else play with Gear VR for the first time, it's super easy:
all you have to do is put it on their head, move one of their hands to
the focus wheel and the other to the touchpad and back button. From
there they can handle it on their own.
Should any phone notifications
come in while you're there, they just pop up in a little card that says
"One new text message" and then vanish from existence. If you need to
see the real world for a sec without taking off the headset, that's
possible too: just hold down the Back button and you can look through
the Note 4's camera. It's a little laggy and not at all like using your eyeballs, but useful in a pinch.
I think my favorite of the built-in apps is the Oculus Cinema. Sean's talked about it at length,
but it's worth mentioning again; the thing is awesome. It's basically a
theater simulator. The app sits you down in a small home theater, a big
movie theater, in a black void, or on THE MOON.
Wherever you choose, you watch content on a screen in front of you, but the real joy is being in the 3D space surrounding it. Looking
around to inspect the home theater chairs around you is almost as fun
as watching a 3D movie trailer (and yes, you can watch 3D movies in 3D
in this 3D space). And the little details, like seeing an "Approved for
all audiences" screen throw green light onto moonrocks, or seeing a
lit-up EXIT sign on the periphery of the theater, make these feel like
real places. Oculus Cinema is where I felt the most presence in Gear VR,
where I felt the most like I actually
was somewhere else.
ike
Man, VR is just so cool. I mean, ugh, I can't even verbalize how cool it is to have a VR headset hanging around my apartment.
Gear VR is stupid simple so it's fantastic for introducing other people
to VR. My co-workers had a blast passing it around. My somewhat
tech-averse fiancee specifically requested to try it out. Samsung's
headset is the easiest way to show people what good virtual reality
looks like, without making them come to your nerd-den. Carrying around
and showing off Gear VR is infinitely easier than schlepping around an
Oculus Rift DK2 and a gaming laptop or something.
It's not wildly (or at all) relevant to using Gear VR for virtual reality, but the Note 4 is a pretty damn good phone.
No Like
I wish there was more to do in it. More stuff should come later, but
the lack of games and the relative shallowness of most of the offerings
make the experience feel shallow. It's awesome, it just doesn't hold my
attention for long. I didn't find anything that made me feel all "OH MY
GOD I NEED TO DO THIS FOR HOURS!!!" but every 5-10 minute burst I had
was great fun.
Not being able to charge and VR at the same time is dumb. 3 hours of
battery life isn't bad, but the bigger problem is that we're talking
about the battery life of your
phone. Who wants to burn through 30 percent of phone battery to mess around in VR for a bit? That shit is precious!
$200 is a teensy bit expensive for a face-case with no controller
included. Gear VR is definitely a big leap beyond Google Cardboard, or
other "slap your phone in here" face-cases, but it's just not quite a
$200 leap. At $100 though it'd be a slam dunk.
There's no guarantee a Galaxy Note 5 will fit in here.
Should You Buy It
Probably not. Unless you are a developer, this isn't even really meant
for you. Yes Gear VR is super cool, and super promising for the future
of virtual reality, but there's not enough to do quite yet to justify
getting one. That is, unless you are a bleeding-edge evangelist who
wants a VR headset you can bring to parties. The content might come in
time, but still, the tech is bound to leap forward in the next year or
two. I mean look at the leap from the first Rift to DK2.
The hardware on Gear VR is all Samsung (Oculus just provides software)
so it's not a perfect parallel, but expect big leaps in screen quality
if nothing else. 518ppi is absurd for a phone, but it's not good enough
for VR. And Samsung has made it pretty clear that "beastly phones that
are made for VR" is a road it wants to go down. This is not a one-off. Rest assured the Note 5 will be repping VR as well, maybe in an even bigger way.
That said, Gear VR is an awesome proof of concept; it's exciting
to see a phone-based VR system that's this good. It's exciting that
we've come this far in the two or so years since the Rift DK1 shipped.
It's exciting to see how great VR could spread to normal people who
wouldn't have to buy a whole gadget especially for it. This is almost
undoubtedly the way virtual reality will make its way to the masses.
The
Gear VR feels like proof that VR headsets aren't a dead-end this time
around, and that you probably won't have to go out of your way to get
one three or four or five years from now. No, you probably shouldn't buy
it right now, but you should be very glad it exists.
