Samsung Gear VR

» see samsung.com/gear-vr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i never strapped a phone to my face for very long. gear vr was the closest that idea ever got to normal, and even at its peak it stayed a novelty you tried at someone's desk and handed back. i work in computer vision now, so the hardware interested me more than the content ever did. the content was the problem the whole category never solved.

the trick was clever and cheap. instead of building a screen and processor into the headset, samsung let your galaxy phone be both. you slid the phone into a plastic housing with two lenses and a head strap, and oculus supplied the software and store. that kept the price near a hundred dollars, and for a couple of years samsung handed them out with phone preorders, so millions of people owned one whether they wanted vr or not.

owning one and using one were different numbers. the phone got hot and the resolution showed every pixel. there were only so many times you wanted to watch a 360 video before the headset went back in a drawer. when oculus shipped the standalone go and then the quest, phone vr had no reason left to exist. samsung's galaxy s10 in 2019 was the last phone that fit, and in 2020 oculus stopped adding apps and let the platform go quiet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

the giveaway was the whole story. samsung needed a reason to sell galaxy phones, so it treated the headset as a marketing bonus rather than a product with its own life. that put more units in homes than any dedicated vr headset of the era, and it also meant most of those units were opened once. the install-base number was real. the usage number behind it was mostly empty.

~ what it became ~

the useful part of gear vr moved into the quest. oculus took what it learned about cheap mobile vr and built the chip and battery straight into the headset, cutting the phone out entirely. that made the thing samsung pioneered obsolete, which is the normal way hardware ideas graduate. gear vr proved people would put a screen on their face if it cost almost nothing. the standalone headset just made the experience good enough to keep doing it.

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