Samsung Teams Up with Oculus for Virtual Reality Headset

Samsung is stepping into the world of virtual reality with its new Oculus driven Gear VR after announcing it at this year’s IFA in Berlin, competing against the likes of Sony Playstation’s Project Morpheus, and of course Facebook’s Oculus Rift.

The Gear VR works as an accessory to Samsung’s newly released Note 4, all by plugging in the phone and essentially wearing it on your face to dive into a virtual world. To get started, the headset comes with a removable faceplate that covers the phone once it’s plugged in so you don’t look entirely like The Terminator as you move around with it on your face. After the phone is plugged in via micro-USB and locked in, the phone switches into VR mode, and you can enter into a Virtual Reality.

Source: Oculus.

On the headset is an accelerometer and a gyroscope to make the motions fluid and responsive, getting rid of the lag that can happen between moving your head, and the vision that you see on the screen. However the device has no range of depth, meaning moving your head forward and back isn’t reflected in the virtual reality.

Using the touchpad on the side of the headset, user’s can select different things…and that’s about it. There isn’t too much interactivity besides actually looking into a virtual reality, considering there are no wires connecting hands or anything else. But that doesn’t mean it’s a total loss. Without the wires, wearer’s can turn 360 degrees, completely immersing themselves in VR, which is pretty cool.

There isn’t any word yet availability, other than it has plans to come out sometime this year. According to VentureBeat, the Gear VR headset will cost $199, not including the price of the Note 4, which will set you back $799 without a phone contract.

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