Yeah, but these would never work with VR. The moment phones became capable of delivering smooth VR, i.e. smooth graphics, the phone PC became a strong possibility for quotidian tasks.
The Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone was about the same size as a VR headset is today.
Imagine the same improvements are made to VR that were made to phones. The VR headsets are expensive bricks right now but they'll be in glasses form factor (or better) with extraordinary usability in the relatively near future. An overlay on the real world that brings remote and nearby contacts into the same room seamlessly.
Phones need to have high refresh rate displays to be usable for VR without contributing to motion sickness. That's becoming a standard for the high-end phones now, but a lot of people still have phones with 60 Hz displays, which is just not enough for VR.
Still, the lenses aren't good enough.
Most mainstream VR headsets don't have text as a clear as your phone for example.
For me the killer use case would be to use VR as a virtual desk, just create an infinite amount of windows/Linux displays, not some kind of crappy mobile browser like oculus does, though lenses and displays need to improve a lot to be clear like a normal multi display setup.
Screens on these phones are pretty advanced. Even the Oculus Rift is just using screens designed for phones. From what John Carmack has said in the past, mobile platforms are easier to control for latency and lag than PCs.
The cellphone market pushing displays forward was only one ingredient. Cellphones don't have low-latency, low-persistence displays, and they don't have the kind of specialized optics needed for a VR headset, and they don't do low-latency high-precision orientation/position tracking.
I was just thinking of something like this the other day. I was kind of lamenting the fact that my phone has the same resolution display as my laptop (1080p), and newer phones have even higher resolution screens, yet I can't really get much work done on one because I can't physically display much text (though I have actually written a decent amount of code from my phone over SSH). Then it occurred to me that if we have VR mounts like Samsung is doing for the Note 4 with the Gear VR we could actually use the super high density screens on our phones for productivity.
Though as the other guy brought up, I guess it may not be the most natural way to read text if you have to actually move your neck, but it may be decent enough that you could adapt to it. And thus, you could write code on the train/bus to work from your phone (at least, until someone mugs you and steals your expensive phone VR setup heh).
well that's quite sad. I was hoping a vr headset could be a valid substitute for multi-monitor setups, we just have to hope they get to that point. Smartphones kind of peaked around 4th gen, so we should wait a couple more gens of vr at least :p
All mobile chips Intel/AMD/Qualcomm Snapdragon/Apple M1 have that functionality available.
They all have GPU and Video Encoders on board.
If any of them have the performance to support the games, refresh rates and resolutions needed for VR is really the question. Especially for extended durations without hitting thermal throttling etc. Although that can come down to enclosure etc.
Wireless for starters is just better and required for VR to rock, with the exception of seated experiences (racing, flight sims, mech games, etc) where presence is kept and you can benefit from a PCs far less limited GPU/CPU capabilities.
Also they have a direct line with the phone manufacturer for the display technology and with this strategy of tying in with the mobile world, they can potentially get into a loop of rapidly updating hardware that's subsidized by phone contracts and the like.
The limitations of mobile graphics can and will be solved in hardware and software. It may turn out for instance that something focused on high FPS and resolution can be achieved via low complexity shaders and some novel custom display/GPU hardware.
I had the opportunity to ask Palmer Luckey (the founder of OR) directly about the possibility of smartphone based HMDs. It turns out he's looked into it quite a bit, but ultimately the unsolvable latency of the sensors made him move on. It could work for viewing 3D content or for situations where the head will only be moved fairly slowly, but it's not a great solution for most applications. I would note that a dedicated handset maker could create the hardware and drivers which fix this.
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