so at the behest of Samsung we've been down in San Francisco for the last
couple of days at their 2016 developers conference to get our fingers on the
puls of what's hot in the industry right now and the answer pretty much no matter
where you look is VR there are still a
lot of challenges to overcome weight of the devices uh dizziness image quality
both in terms of frame rate and resolution cost the requirement to have
a phone connected though Samsung did hint they are working on Standalone
devices but there is a lot of cool stuff
coming down the pipe that is going to help continue vr's March towards
mainstream acceptance first up is the gear 360 this is not the first time
they've shown it the actual unveiling was at Mobile World Congress about a
month ago but this was our first chance to spend some real quality Hands-On time
with it the device itself is pretty simple on each side you'll find a 180°
wide angle f2.0 aperture lens with uh
combined 30 megapixels of sensor resolution behind them though it appears
that that resolution is utilized only for Stills and when it comes to video
you'll be limited to almost 4K or 3840
by 1920 the unit we checked out isn't
quite finished so the side door was taped on but that didn't stop us from
popping it off to have a look at the micro SD slot and swappable 1350
milliamp battery that's good for two or so hours of recording the camera is dust
and splash resistant there will be an an ip68 rated case available later and
we're expecting at the time of filming this it to cost somewhere in the
neighborhood of $400 given its €350
price across the pond that's cool Linus but how does it work really well
actually this is an impressive little piece of Kit you pick your mode Stills
video time-lapse or short looping video
is a separate mode from video for some reason then with the camera paired to
the phone via Wi-Fi Direct you don't have enough bandwidth to save a file
directly to the phone this way but what you'll get is a really nice live preview
of what you're shooting once you press record then what you do is you browse
the files on the camera convert and copy them over to your phone and you can play
it back a number of different ways you can view the raw unstitched file you can
look around using the motion sensor on your phone or you can pop it in a gear
VR and have the full immersive experience considering that it's priced
similarly to a high-end GoPro I can see a lot lot of creators having a ton of
fun with a device like this speaking of fun it's time to go hit the VR demos
first up is gaming this Vulcan demo was really impressive they got this alien
assault game that's reminiscent of a VR game that I played at an arcade about 12
years ago so weapon aiming is handled by looking rather than actually pointing
the weapon the graphics are fairly rudimentary and given it's a tech demo
it's impressive it's playable at all but the gameplay is pretty easy with a
blaster that takes out like 10 dudes at once once in a secondary fire with no
recharge that drops an asteroid on the entire assaulting Force which doesn't
sound impressive until you consider that this is running on a device that is
literally a thousandth the size of the gigantic gaming booth that I was
standing in all those years ago and this is in no small part thanks to Vulcan the
low-level API that is Now supported on the Galaxy S7 is capable of volumetric
effects realtime Shadows light refraction anti-aliasing translucency
and in a nutshell a similar or better graphical experience than what you could
expect from an Xbox 360 a last gen gaming console I mean sure you won't be
running this realtime star Mass
accumulation demo in a VR environment
yet but seeing the performance improvement from open GES to Vulcan
gives me more hope for the rate at which this is going to improve in the future
downstairs we found a couple of more impressive demos what stood out about
this one was the fact that aside from using ceras to track the location of the
person they tricked out these Nerf guns
with lights and actually I think they're
bluo Wireless triggers so you could play
another sort of drone assault game firing the gun independently of where
your head is pointed because it's wireless the latency did make it a
little bit disorienting but man when
accessories like this come out for lower latency Solutions like the HTC
VI VR man very cool which isn't to say that every
game likee VR experience has to be all about the lowest possible latency I
think the most impressive demo we saw was from globa cor they had this sort of
escape room with 83500 optit track cameras feeding into a
sixc core desktop running a gtx980 and
then from there the positional data was streamed over Wi-Fi to a Galaxy S7 in a
gear VR that is actually running the
game itself the graphical Fidelity of which
was the best we saw running off of a phone here at the show the position of
rigid bodies uh their rotations and positions in the scene are being tracked
by the cameras and to differentiate the objects in the scene white I reflective
markers are attached in unique patterns so they can be manipulated and
reconfigured to solve the puzzle their Indiana Jon style puzzle uses a total of
10 tracked objects including a lantern that provides more or less light to you
in real time there are some limitations here if you put the objects too close
together things can get a bit janky and the and the same goes if you obstruct
the camera's view of the IR reflective markers but overall the immersion was
the best out of the demos we saw and they even told us they had problems with
people trying to run out of the room that they were trapped in once the door
lifted and had to physically restrain people to keep them from barging into a
physical wall oops so thanks for checking out our VR Roundup here at the
Samsung developer conference 2016 don't miss any of our Samsung developer
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