Samsung’s announcement of Gear VR on Wednesday did not come as a huge surprise. There has been talk of a Samsung/Oculus partnership for months. We knew that the screens inside the DK2 are Samsung made, and there were rumours of a deeper relationship being behind that. Almost a year ago John Carmack was saying “Oculus Rift could someday run Android to offer a standalone VR experience”. Now that the announcement has been made, though, the potential implications that this new device has for the VR market are becoming clearer to see.

The idea of using smartphone to power a stand-alone VR experience is not new. However, Gear VR is not a simple plastic enclosure and strap. Featuring a trackpad, buttons and, most importantly, trackers and firmware built into the headset, optimised to work in concert with the Galaxy Note 4. Oculus makes bold claims about the effectiveness the device to deliver latency performance “equivalent to the most highly optimised experiences on the DK2”. Darknet developer E McNeill provides detailed and glowing impressions of the performance of the device in his announcement of a version of the game being available for the Gear VR’s launch. Titans of Space developer, Drash has also said some good things about the head tracking performance.

Certainly, if this captures the public imagination and most importantly if the content arrives, it could be a huge boon to Samsung in the phone market, and a big blow to the iOS hegemony, as people consider switching to a Galaxy Note 4 for their next upgrade.

There is every reason to believe that content will arrive. At Inition’s latest meetup in London there was talk of WebVR and the market opportunity presented by Google Cardboard. One thing that mobile platforms have traditionally done very well, better than PC, is to monetise and to get people to pay for software. There are dozens of small studios and indie devs that are currently reliant on crowdfunding with no market to actually sell their VR experiences. There are dozens of experiences for the DK1 that would be well suited to adaption for Gear VR and sold through the Oculus Store and I’ve no doubt that their developers will welcome a viable opportunity to earn revenue from the sale of their work. Aside from DK1 darlings Titans of Space, Darknet and Dreadhalls, other games that work best untethered like Triangular Pixels Smash Hit Plunder were quick to announce their support of GearVR. I would not be the least bit surprised if we see several other familiar VR titles crop up with release announcements in the coming weeks. The announcement of Oculus Cinema and a 360 video viewer suggest that VR film-makers, too, will have a chance to make some money from their pioneering work.

Although r/oculus might be appalled at the suggestion, arguably, ‘Powered by Oculus’ might as well read‘CV1,’ or at least ‘CV0.5’. Bear in mind that previous Galaxy Note sold over 10 million units in 60 days. The potential market size is huge – if the Note 4 sells as well as its predecessor then only 1% of Note owners would need to invest in a Gear VR to create a larger market than exists for the Oculus Rift dev kits. The initial release is being called an ‘innovator edition’ and not a ‘final consumer product’ – but it seems to me quite plausible that given enough support from experienced DK1 developers, Gear VR will mark the first emergence of a viable consumer marketplace for VR software.

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