Samsung Gear VR Virtual Reality Headset

Posted by Liam Foot on January 24, 2016 Reviews

I had been eagerly awaiting the UK release of the Gear VR Consumer Version since it was first announced for the US market. A few months ago I started playing around with Google Cardboard and the Oculus` Rift DK2 for a project at uni, and found VR to be a very interesting realm. Rift DK2 was great fun, and though it had great sensors for accurate positional and rotational head tracking, it lacked in clarity with the low pixel density. Google Cardboard with my S6 Edge+ was a mediocre experience, however it gave me hope for what Gear VR could enable.

Google Cardboard is a cheap VR option, and will give you a glimpse of what is possible. Cardboard viewers use cheap lenses in front of most smartphones to make the app look like you’re looking through a window into another world, to an extent. The experience you get with Cardboard depends majorly on the phone you use, and personally I think most phones produce a very poor experience with Cardboard. Considering the S6 Edge+, the phone is powerful enough and has a good enough display to produce decent results with Cardboard, but Cardboard isn’t comfortable, it doesn’t block out light very well, and it relies on the phones’ sensors for head tracking. The sensor issue is a big one, as even in the most expensive smartphones, the sensors are not good enough to facilitate accurate and responsive head tracking, which is extremely important to your comfort in VR, and to not getting VR sickness.

So what if you could take some more accurate sensors to make the headset track smoothly like the Rift, take some higher quality lenses to improve clarity, and make the device comfortable to use? The result is Gear VR.

Gear VR is a well-built product. It has comfortable foam padding and high quality lenses which are adjustable to get the right focus. It comes with two straps - one around the head and one over the top, and has a trackpad on the right side for input, along with a back button and volume controls. The trackpad is the main input for the Gear VR, and many apps and games make use of it. Gear VR also features an accurate gyroscope and accelerometer, which is what enables the butter-smooth head tracking, and resulting immersive experience when using Gear VR that minimizes VR sickness.

Whereas Google Cardboard is not at all immersive and makes me feel sick after 5 to 10 minutes of light usage, Gear VR is very comfortable to use and in many situations I can use the device without feeling sick at all, and this is mostly due to the butter-smooth head tracking. Feeling sick with Google Cardboard is your body’s way of rejecting the poor head tracking from the sensors inside any mobile phone, which give very poor accuracy and responsiveness. Gear VR ensures that when you move your head, the virtual world moves with you, exactly the right amount, without drifting, and in a smooth motion. This is what allows you to accept the virtual world and become immersed inside it, and to not feel sick.

In my experience, it’s mainly the head tracking that makes for an immersive experience, then I rate the lenses second. However, when immersed in the VR experience, you will still be able to see pixels on the display. This may seem strange to some people, and will make certain things challenging, such as focussing on objects at a distance. It is a limitation of current technology which would be improved if the phone used a higher resolution display, however it will require more GPU power from the phone to run games at that new resolution.

To share more about sickness, as it’s a very important topic, there are situations where I have felt sick using the Gear VR – these are situations that do not agree with what your body is doing in real life, e.g. spinning upside down in the virtual world when you are sat in a stationary chair in the real world – it’s the disconnect that makes you feel sick and it’s unavoidable, so I don’t go for those types of VR apps and experiences. To give an example, I played a demo called Dreadhalls recently. It’s a first person horror game which requires a gamepad, and the gamepad is used for turning. Any game that requires a gamepad for turning makes me feel sick – not literally, and I don’t think I would actually be sick, but it makes me feel very uneasy. At least for me, VR isn’t going to work with first person shooters, as my body doesn’t accept what the headset is telling me.

On the topic of apps and games, there are plenty of good ones I’ve discovered from my short time using it so far. Naming one – there is a game called Smash Hit, which has you flying on-the-rails in a straight line, in smooth motion (99% of the time). You have to throw metal balls at glass planes to shatter it/make holes to pass through, which you do by tapping the trackpad. Words can’t do this game justice, but it really amazed me that this experience was possible on a smartphone. When the glass shatters, it doesn’t simply disappear – you can watch the shards as they bounce into other objects, and watch your metal balls perhaps collide with another plane of glass and break that one too – the level of physics in this game is highly impressive, and amazing considering that my phone is powering it. This is a free game and I highly recommend it to any Gear VR owner, along with an amazing puzzle game called Esper.

The Oculus Store, where you get Gear VR apps, appears to have a decent number of apps in it. You can browse the store on your phone normally, or in the Gear VR in virtual reality, which is a great experience. The Oculus software is very good, and has a very useful feature that allows you to re-center the Gear to your new position. For example, if you start using the Gear facing one way, but you would like to re-center the world so that the front is over to your left, you can look over to your left, hold the back button, and you have access to a menu with this option on it – very useful feature. This menu also has a camera pass-through, where you can look through your phone’s rear camera to check on the real world you just left behind, and a do not disturb button to block notifications.

Games are great fun, and right now I think games are where it’s at with Gear VR, but people like to talk about 360-degree videos and watching movies in the Oculus Cinema. The Oculus Cinema is fantastic – very vivid. When a movie is playing, you can even see the light reflecting off the seats in the cinema. Movies was my main motivation to purchase the Gear VR, however I would not recommend watching movies on it. As I said, the cinema is very good – the issue is that the movies you play in the cinema will be quite pixelated, and as I said earlier, it doesn’t help that you can see each pixel on your phone’s display. This is quite true for many things, and doesn’t apply only to movies, however I found my eyes strained when I attempted to watch Spectre in the Oculus Cinema and the experience is better outside of VR for the time being, and the virtual cinema screen doesn’t have enough pixels to properly display the content. If the Galaxy S7 and its variants come out with 4k displays, then that might do the trick for movies, as the clarity of the movie will increase significantly due to the higher pixel density.

So Gear VR costs £80 – is it worth it?

For someone owning a compatible phone – which includes the S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and Note 5 – who is also interested in VR, then yes, it’s worth it. It has provided me with some great experiences, however be prepared that some things may make you feel nauseous, so I recommend testing it out first if you can. Should you buy a compatible phone just for the Gear VR? For a general consumer, I’d say probably not – Gear VR is mainly for those who already use Samsung phones. It’s a great technology that has come further than I had expected at this stage, however some dreams of mine, such as watching movies in a virtual cinema, are not yet ready to my liking in VR. I hold out hope that the S7 and its variants will bring 4K displays for better movie viewing, but for right now, there are some great games to get your money’s worth.

This review is also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DO7LIUXQWTV7/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

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