[MartinMcGirk]

You know what this is going to be great for? Travelling.

I'm facing a flight from Scotland to Australia in December where I'm going to be sat in economy class on a no-frills Air-China flight for god-only-knows how long, and my options to distract myself are currently either read a book on my kindle, or play or watch something on the iPad. I would kill for one of these.

The problems with my existing options are that I can be distracted by seeing people moving around next to me, or I can check my watch absent mindedly, or one of many things might happen that could bring me back into the reality of being sandwiched into a sweaty tin can. Time can pass very slowly when you're travelling.

VR on the other hand completely transports your mind to a place where time isn't really relevant anymore. You need to block out all of your surroundings to really make it work, which means no seeing other passengers get up for toilet breaks, no listening to the engine buzzing along as you read. If I could put this headset on with a decent pair of headphones, and all of a sudden be flying around space in some mobile equivalent of Elite:Dangerous or watching a movie in properly immersive 3D then time would just speed by and my flight wouldn't be so bloody awful.

I've got an Oculus DK2, but I sadly can't lug my beast of a desktop PC on to a flight with me to power it. In terms of being the VR headset of choice for gamers, I'm pretty convinced that Sony will eventually win that battle with their PS4 Project Morpheus headset. This won't compete with either of those two excellent experiences, but I think that as a traveling accessory at least, a wireless headset that uses your phone as a screen could be a god-send.

[endergen]

Sony has a fixed hardware system. PS4 is likely to be around for at least 5 years. Carmack has stated already (and I doubt he's bullshit, even with his competitive motivations) that this gen of consoles just aren't powerful enough for what VR needs to be truly immersive. From my experience, most PS4 games struggle to even maintain 60fps at 1080P. VR is likely to require more than 4x resolution and even 1.5-3x refresh rates. Who knows what kind of latency is baked into the graphic cards and such because they didn't think they'd need more refresh rate.

I'd concede that maybe Morpheus will be just good enough to make it work, games can be simplified to run faster, and games can very tuned unlike PC games because it's fixed hardware.

Personally I think any one of the players in the game can just copy any strategy anyone else makes, to a point. Samsung for instance is likely going to be ahead of the game on display technology manufacturing, but who knows I don't have the best handle on the display screen technology race.

[KaoruAoiShiho]

If your requirements are high quality graphics VR will be crap for the foreseeable future. Very few people have the graphics power for good VR in their home PCs, the market is basically non existent.

Sony has the first party advantage in terms of getting their stuff to look beautiful and artistic at low graphics quality. Games like Journey and tearaway have demonstrated Sony's mastery in this regard. Their gaming ecosystem is first class, a huge advantage over FB and Samsung.

My money is on Sony until the PS5, which is when the 2x4k and 120hz era of VR will begin.

[mgolawala]

Great, but be sure to pack a good book for the remaining 13 hours of flight time after your devices have used up their battery.

Editing comment to respond to replies in one place instead of individually.

1) The Note 4 is housed inside the Gear VR. Larger battery pack probably won't fit. You will need to carry spare batteries. Possibly the next generation might solve this.

2) I may have missed it, but I didn't see anyway to charge the Note 4 while using the Gear VR. So assuming you do have a charging port, you would need to stop and charge the device. Or carry a spare device to charge your spare battery while you use the Gear VR.

Just to be clear, I am not criticizing the Gear VR. My response was only targeted at the Parent comment's use case. I think it is really cool that Samsung is trying to think out of the box and come up with innovations. Some will stick, some won't. We will see.

[aaxx1503]

The Note series has the best battery life in the smartphone game. An external battery pack is also easy to bring along.

[cbr]

Are there flights without charging ports nowadays?

[Someone1234]

In economy? Uhh yes. A lot.

In business class and above? Fewer.

[bookwormAT]

there are power outlets on long distance flights.

[wildpeaks]

It could be an add-on for Business class (where you have more space to move), similar to how it's standard to get audio headphones in planes. It could even have the additional position tracking camera embedded in the front seat to make tracking more accurate.

It wouldn't have to be wireless (because you're meant to stay in your seat anyway) so that would solve the battery issue, or even simpler to implement: the headset could just have an opening for the power coord and let the user use his own phone coord with the regular power outlet (that way he can choose between wireless or wired based on his battery level & expected usage duration, without having to replace the seats, so that save implementation costs).

As for being brought back to reality, this could be a solution: http://youtu.be/fEiyzJDFiJI

[spyder]

It would be fun if airplanes would integrate with these portable VR gears: using cameras outside the airplane to create a panoramic view in VR so you could look around without seeing the plane and feel like you are flying without a plane. Also they could show info above cities when you look down on them.

[StavrosK]

Why do you think Sony will win?

[MartinMcGirk]

I'm a bit late in replying, but hopefully you'll still see this. My current reasoning goes something like this:

The Oculus is aimed at high-end PC gamers. I know this because I have a desktop running an i7 3.5GHz quad core processor with 16GB of RAM and a £200 NVIDIA GTX 760 graphics card, and my PC still struggles occasionally to keep frame-rates high enough for VR. And that's just the DK2; expectations are that the consumer version will have a higher resolution and require even more oomph to work. Your average person that plays computer games on a PC is unlikely to have the resources available to commit to that kind of hardware expenditure.

My flatmate for instance plays a lot of games on steam, but they're mostly older games. If he wanted to get an Oculus he'd have to pay £300 for the headset, then another £200 (at least) for a new graphics card, more for a new processor (apparently some of the demos can be quite CPU intensive) and then he'd need to make sure his PSU could cope with all that extra hardware. That's a lot of money up front to make VR work. I should know because I just went through it.

Sony on the other hand has over 10 million PS4's in the wild, all running the same specs, and all with no upgrade path. If Sony can make a VR headset that runs against the PS4 specifications, even at lower graphics levels, then for PS4 owners the road to VR costs whatever Project Morpheus costs, and no more. Lets put it on equal pegging with the Oculus at around £300. That's a much easier sell.

Further to that, people own computers for a whole bunch of reasons. People work on their computers, they code, and they edit videos on them. Being able to play games for them is only part of the value they paid money for. Some people do have PC's purely for games, but I'd be surprised if most people used their PC's primarily for gaming. PS4 owners on the other hand have already shelled out money for a dedicated gaming device. People in that situation (so my theory goes) should be more easily sold on a VR gaming accessory.

The way I see things panning out is this. The Oculus will likely continue to provide the state-of-the-art in VR experience for the real VR fanatics or the hard core PC gamer crowd. They will also probably scoop up a whole bunch of professional users too, in the form of architects or engineers or the like. But the costs of all the peripheral PC equipment you need to make the Oculus a decent experience will see off the "mainstream". In my view, it'll take someone like Sony (or an xbox equivalent) to offer a lesser, but good-enough, product to a large audience of people who are already bought into "gaming" to really make VR a viable and mainstream gaming platform.

I think Sony stand a pretty good chance of "winning" for those reasons.

[StavrosK]

Oh, damn. I've been drooling over an oculus for a while, but I didn't know it needed a beefy pc. Isn't it just full HD? That's the same resolution as my screen. Why would it need more power than driving just the screen?

[MartinMcGirk]

As I understand it (by reading up on the subject over the last few months - I'm no games professional), the DK2 uses one 1080p screen split across both eyes, but the sticking point is that it has to render each frame twice from slightly different positions in order to get the image right for each eye. Add to this that the DK2 needs to run at 75 frames a second for the experience to smooth, it means that your computer needs to be effectively running the game or demo at 150fps. It also has to have enough in the tank left over to power your computer monitor.

It's a great product though. If you can afford to upgrade your computer to accommodate it then I can't recommend the experience highly enough. Money well spent in my opinion.