Gadgetory

it all began with a topic on the wine show there was an article on VentureBeat titled VR adoption among Steam users has crashed to a halt Linus was all like what and I wasn't actually surprised and I explained my theory as to why it was happening but that doesn't mean I was happy about it I speculated that it was due to the marketing issues behind explaining the experience to people that were unable to try it for themselves the total cost of ownership being very high and finally that the inferior experience of the gear VR which Samsung is marketing like crazy has the potential to leave people unsatisfied with the gear VR and therefore uninterested in other VR experiences in the car a couple days later I heard a radio ad for the Samsung gear VR this triggered some trains of thought through my brain first of which was concern for people that had the type-c connector with their Galaxy Note 7s and then going a little bit deeper I began to question my original rant on the LAN show who or what actually killed VR Who am I supposed to be mad at is it marketing is it cost is it Samsung or is it oculus let's dig deeper freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster click now to try for free in order to answer this question we need to establish some data points the main one of which being cost of entry starting from nothing a gear vr ranges from about four hundred and seventy US dollars for a Galaxy S six and a 2015 version of the gear VR to about a thousand US dollars for a shiny new note seven and a 2016 version of the gear VR now one thing that hurts the install base for gear VR is that it is very unlikely that someone would buy a phone solely for the purpose of playing with their gear VR but in that same vein especially with Apple's so-called courageous abandonment of the headphone jack this also helps them as it is very likely that your next phone would be an s6 and s6 edge and s6 edge plus a note five a galaxy s7 and s7 edge or a note seven all of which are compatible with the new gear VR 2016 computers are similar in this way but scaled up a bit if you don't have a gaming PC yet you're probably looking at about sixteen hundred US dollars for a rig that meets the recommended spec and an oculus rift included slightly over three times the from nothing cost of a gear VR and the top-end well if you've ever watched any of our videos I'm sure you know by now when it comes to computers the sky isn't the limit for cost it's more like galaxies far far away on top of that benchmarking VR is in its infancy so choosing a VR computer is not only prohibitively expensive but probably also rather confusing for most people now of course there are those of us with computers fast enough to support VR already but unfortunately that number whatever it is is assuredly much much lower than the number of people that will already have a Samsung phone and even a high-end one thanks to carrier subsidies and even if the starting install bases were equal that still leaves desk Villar at 600 to 800 dollars minimum for a headset versus 70 to a hundred for a gear VR now that we've established that I need a couple people that aren't me or anyone else at Linus Media Group I need people with no experience with desktop VR beyond the oculus development kit one but who can appreciate technology my plan was to have them try a gear VR paired with an s7 edge with darknet Temple Run and Eve Gun Jack give their impressions to the camera and then try an HTC vive with hollow-point audio shield raw data and Google tilt brush now there are a couple problems with this test I could have changed the order that they tried the headsets in instead of having them go on a rising curve from the gear VR up to the HTC vive I could have had them go on a falling curve from the vive down to the gear VR it's also heavily app dependent I didn't show them the oculus rift I didn't show them any seated experience and the game experiences aren't really apples to apples as in I should have had them demoed a Valkyrie considering they tried gun jack but worst of all my sample size it's small and I should feel bad if this was a proper study it would have probably been a couple hundred people at least but this wasn't a proper study and I think we got our answer anyways it's surprisingly simple money it's just too damn expensive when all said and done all the experience improvements and health benefits mean nothing if people just plain can't afford it after everything when I asked them which one they would choose between the two they both chose to my utter dismay prefer the gear I have to give it to the gear VR neither of my subjects had VR ready P C's also unsurprisingly they both had Samsung phones compatible with the gear VR 1600 plus US dollars is a hard pill to swallow when you could just pass over a hundred bucks and get part of the way there even if I would argue that it's not close at all in terms of quality of experience it's also not that close in terms of cost and your are able to shed the cable allowing you to take it with you on trips and stuff as well though to be fair I did hear from one of my test subjects that days later he was still thinking about tilt brush he even went as far as to say that it left a fundamentally different psychological imprint but that didn't make him want to buy it that made him want to try it again I still think the lack of exposure for desktop VR and the overexposure of mobile VR are relatively large issues I still think the fact that the industry is generally calling them the same damn thing doesn't help matters either but if my flawed study is to be believed cost really is the root here desktop VR isn't dead it just had a bit of a false start here's hoping they can turn things around soon Tunnel bear is the super simple VPN application that makes it really easy to enjoy a more private and open Internet what tunnel bear turned on your private information is kept yours away from your internet provider advertisers hackers and just anyone looking to track and profit off of your data Tom bear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity you can try for free with 500 megabytes and no credit card required and if you do choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save up to 10% by going in a tunnel bear comm /l tt thanks for watching guys if this video sucked I completely understand I don't like saying negative things about desktop VR either so hit the like button also if you liked it hit the like button too because why not that'll it's I think I'm cheating here a little bit but that's fine get subscribed either way if you want to buy something cool we'll check out Amazon we talked about a number of things in this video also in the description down below we have shirts I don't think you can buy this one anymore ah get rekt but you can buy other ones which would also be cool you can talk about what I said in this video on the community forum it's a fantastic site check that out also watch this video which is like my review of the oculus rift and in there I talked about some comparisons between the vive and yada yada yada yada anyways see you next time