With Facebook-owned Oculus shifting its focus to the mid-range Oculus Quest, while still supporting the high-end Oculus Rift and the entry-level Oculus Go, it might make sense for the company to drop Samsung’s Gear VR from its lineup of VR headsets.
That doesn’t seem to be the case though, according to a recent The Verge interview with Nate Mitchell, Oculus’ vice president of product.
Mitchell told the publication that Oculus still views the Gear VR as a priority, stating that, “A lot of the work that we’re doing on Oculus Go carries right over to Gear VR — they’re binary compatible. So a lot of the improvements we’ve been making to the software side, a lot of the products we’ve been investing in, are coming to Gear VR as well.”
Still, the last major hardware update to the Gear VR — which shipped five million headsets as of January 2017 — was a new controller that released over a year ago. News related to the Gear VR has been scarce at Oculus Connect, too. Even Samsung neglected to mention the headset at its recent keynote for the Note 9.
While phone-powered VR is an affordable way to jump into the virtual reality space if you already own the phone that powers the headset in question, it doesn’t always result in the greatest experience.
Google also seems to be letting its Daydream project fall to the wayside, though the company could have something in store for its upcoming fall hardware event.
Source: The Verge
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