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HTC has hit back against claims of declining VR sales figures:
The blog post in particular references a report from Digital Trends which talks about VR sales figures from Amazon, and proceeds to point out a number of ways which the data presented could be misleading.
Several points made by HTC Vive are ones that have also been addressed by VRFocus, as seen in an article about the modern VR cycle, and some comments in the weekly VR vs. article. HTC Vive were not pulling punches right from the very start, evening saying in the introduction: "Analyst reports are in and apparently, it's curtains for Virtual Reality (VR). Pardon us if we're not heeding the alarms. News of the so-called death of VR comes once a year and is greatly exaggerated."
From there, the blog post proceeds in a point-by-point fashion, discussing how early consumer VR was largely driven by smartphone-based devices such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Not only have these devices been superseded by standalone units like the Oculus Go, which offer a better visual experience, but the promotional offers which were available for phone launches have now long since passed. HTC Vive also point out that PC-based VR companies are yet to release any solid sales figures, and that much of the growth of premium VR has been centered around location-based VR centres, something which the Digital Trends report did not address.
Related: HTC's Vive Pro to Launch on April 5
Facebook Launches Oculus Go, a $200 Standalone VR Headset
VirtualLink Consortium Announces USB Type-C Specification for VR Headsets
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 27 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
Potentially, Android-based standalone headsets (no smartphone) could be less locked down than some smartphones. Oculus Go for instance has no cellular connection and therefore no interaction with phone carriers. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
Qualcomm is trying to take its Snapdragon ARM SoCs a little further than smartphones. Q showed off a standalone VR headset [theverge.com] with the Snapdragon 845 in it (Oculus Go uses Snapdragon 821, and Lenovo Mirage Solo [wikipedia.org] uses Snapdragon 835). They have Snapdragon 850 specifically for Windows on ARM PCs, and are rumored to be putting out a more powerful Snapdragon 1000 [soylentnews.org]. So I could see them making a SoC specifically for VR headsets that has better emphasis on I/O and latency.
As for phone-based headsets, on the YouTube VR story [soylentnews.org] I pointed to the Galaxy S9 (2960×1440, 18.5:9) and OnePlus 6 (2280×1080, 19:9). The crazy wide aspect ratios are a good thing because you want as much horizontal field-of-view as possible. The resolutions are bonkers for normal use, and there has already been a 2160p smartphone (Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium, and probably several others). So they are moving in the right direction to make Gear VR (or Cardboard) better. But AFAIK these are all limited to 60 Hz, when you want at least 90 Hz and preferably 120 Hz. The good thing about smartphone VR is that about 2 billion people have smartphones, and it's usually close by. They could carry a compact/folded phone headset with them. Although who is brave enough to be the mofo on the bus or train wearing a VR headset?
Personally, if I was going to get into PC beefy GPU + VR, I would want 6 degrees of freedom (no external sensor thingy) and no wires/tether on the headset. That means using a high speed wireless connection [soylentnews.org] such as 802.11ad (formerly known as WiGig). VESA Display Compression-M v1.1 has 5:1 "visually lossless" compression. So the maximum ~7 Gbps of WiGig becomes closer to an effective 35 Gbps, which could be enough for 4K @ 120 Hz. The AOMedia Video 1 codec [wikipedia.org] should lower bandwidth requirements compared to H.265/HEVC, and it seems to do best at high resolutions such as 2160p [bitmovin.com]. Some of these could introduce latency, but it just means that we need to improve the hardware.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @07:24PM
i think we're on the same page ... just this "no external sensor thingy".
it might sound silly to track real physical object in VR, afterall it's VR and you can create anything there ...
BUT it is awesome how you can put the VIVE hand controller on the (real) floor and in VR you see it at the correct distance,
thus if you reached for the controller in VR in real space you actually touch the controller too.
so maybe having more real physical object being tracked in VR ... is not such a bad thing.
my guess is, that you could just take a small "chip thingy" and glue it or tape it to some real object to have that
object then tracked in VR.... maybe a small device like those amazon click-to-order-one-thing devices?