Gadgetory

so at the behest of Samsung we've been down in San Francisco for the last couple of days at their 2016 Developers Conference to get our fingers on the pulse of what's hot in the industry right now and the answer pretty much no matter where you look is VR there are still a lot of challenges to overcome way to the devices dizziness image quality both in terms of frame rate and resolution cost the requirement to have a phone connected though Samsung did hit they are working on standalone devices but there is a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe that is going to help continue VRS march towards mainstream acceptance first up is the gear 360 this is not the first time they've shown it the actual unveiling was at Mobile World Congress about a month ago but this was our first chance to spend some real quality hands-on time with it the device itself is pretty simple on each side you'll find a 180 degree wide angle F 2.0 aperture lens with combined 30 megapixels of sensor resolution behind them though it appears that that resolution is utilized only for Stills and when it comes to video you'll be limited to almost 4k or 3840 by 1920 the unit we checked out isn't quite finished so the side door was taped on but that didn't stop us from popping it off to have a look at the micro SD slot and swappable 1350 milliamp hour battery that's good for two or so hours of recording the camera is dust and splash resistant there will be an IP 68 rated case available later and we're expecting at the time of filming this it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 u.s. dollars given its 350 euro price across the pond that's cool Linus but how does it work really well actually this is an impressive little piece of kit you pick your mode stills video time-lapse or short looping video is a separate mode from video for some reason then with the camera paired to the phone via Wi-Fi direct you won't have enough bandwidth to save a file directly to the phone this way but what you'll get is a really nice live preview of what you're shooting once you press record then what you do is you browse the files on the camera convert and copy them over to your phone and you can play it back a number of different ways you can view the raw unstitched file you can look around using the motion sensor on your phone or you can pop it in a gear VR and have the full immersive experience considering that it's priced similarly to a high-end GoPro I can see a lot of creators having a ton of fun with a device like this speaking of fun it's time to go hit the VR demos first up is gaming this Vulcan demo was really impressive they got this alien assault game that's reminiscent of a VR game that I played at an arcade about 12 years ago so weapon aiming is handled by looking rather than actually pointing the weapon the graphics are fairly rudimentary and given it's a tech demo it's impressive its playable at all but the gameplay is pretty easy with a blaster that takes out like ten dudes at once in a secondary fire with no recharge that drops an asteroid on the entire assaulting force which doesn't sound impressive until you consider that this is running on a device that is literally a thousandth the size of the gigantic gaming booth that I was standing in all those years ago and this is in no small part thanks to Vulcan the low-level API that is now supported on the galaxy s7 is capable of volumetric effects real-time shadows light refraction anti-aliasing translucency and in a nutshell a similar or better graphical experience than what you could expect from an xbox 360 a last gen gaming console I mean sure you won't be running this real-time star mass accumulation demo in a VR environment yet but seeing the performance improvement from OpenGL es2 Vulcan gives me more hope for the rate at which this is going to improve in the future downstairs we found a couple of more impressive demos what stood out about this one was the fact that aside from using cameras to track the location of the person they tricked out these nerf guns with lights and actually I think they're Bluetooth wireless triggers so you could play another sort of drone assault game firing the gun independently of where your head is pointed because it's wireless the latency did make it a little bit disorienting but then when accessories like this come out for lower latency solutions like the HTC vive Oh Villar man very cool which isn't to say that every game like VR experience has to be all about the lowest possible latency I think the most impressive demo we saw was from Globo core they had this sort of escape room with eight $3500 opti track cameras feeding into a six core desktop running a gtx 980 and then from there the positional data was streamed over Wi-Fi to a galaxy s7 in a gear vr that is actually running the game itself the graphical fidelity of which was the best we saw running off of a phone here at the show the position of rigid bodies their rotations and positions in the scene are being tracked by the cameras and to differentiate the objects in the scene white IR reflective markers are attached and unique patterns so they can be manipulated and reconfigured to solve the puzzle there Indiana jones-style puzzle uses a total of ten tracked objects including a lantern that provides more or less light to you in real time there are some limitations here if you put the objects too close together things can get a bit janky and and the same goes if you obstruct the camera's view of the IR reflective markers but overall the immersion was the best out of the demos we saw and they even told us they had problems with people trying to run out of the room that they were trapped in once the door lifted and had to physically restrain people to keep them from barging into a physical wall oops so thanks for checking out our VR roundup here at the Samsung developer conference 2016 don't miss any of our Samsung developer conference videos by checking out the applicable 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