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Mark joined us to tell us about Diablo 3’s 2.3.0 patch on our Into Gaming feature
Gio in Cooper City, Florida called in to ask about a virtual reality set we discussed a few weeks ago
He said: Question about virtual reality glasses that I saw on a recent video – I fell in love with them, but I’m not really sure how they work – how you can interact with your phone.
Gio, what you saw was the Samsung Gear VR (as in Virtual Reality), and it’s really cool. It does a great job of tracking your head and immersing you in a 3D world that responds very naturally to your movements.
The way it interacts with the phone is simple: you open a lid on the font and the phone literally goes inside the headset. After it’s inside, the phone projects two images (one for each eye) to give you a 3D effect, and it tracks your head’s movement using it’s built in gyroscope so that it can move the images as your head moves.
the phone literally goes inside the headset
Now, that’s the cool part, here come the bad parts: it costs $200, there’s only a handful of apps that work with it, and it only works with Samsung phones… specifically only with Samsung Note phones… as long as it’s the Note 4… yup, it’s useless unless you own a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and the Note 4 is not a cheap phone that you’d buy just to use with a headset.
We have good news for you though! Google came out with a competitor that’s not limited to the Note 4. It’s called Google Cardboard, and as you probably guessed it is entirely made out of cardboard. Now Google used it to show off the same feature and gave the kits away at their Google I/O conference this year (some years you get a phone, some years you get a Chromebook, some years you get a cube made out of recycled egg cartons). You can buy copies of the same kit for as little as $4 online.