Samsung Odyssey a premium VR headset hits the price floor at Microsoft.com $349 just as impending news of the Samsung Odyssey+ shakes the VR Market.
At the same time Brendan Iribe leaves Oculus, because there is no Oculus 2 on the schedule Brendan wanted. Facebook is still committed to supporting desktop VR, they just aren’t ready to talk about their plans right now.
This scroll has been writ v. Micah Blumberg
The Price of the Samsung Odyssey is now $349 a whopping $150 dollars off, this headset already a year old has a resolution matching the HTC Vive Pro. So what you are getting next with the Odyssey+ will feel so much more impressive, and the annual release schedule is really smart in these early days of the VR PC market.
About a year after Samsung released the Odyssey it looks like it will release the Odyssey+ which is an update to its already great Windows Mixed Reality headset. Both headsets play all the Steam VR games and they play the Oculus Rift games via a 3rd party software called Revive.
The Samsung Odyssey Mixed Reality+ headset, with it’s simplified setup, involving no external cameras and no external lighthouses, is probably the most portable desktop capable VR headset on the market. With high quality Stereo surround sound headphones built into it. I expect that this headset would be the choice of traveling developers because of how portable and how quick it is to set up, especially when paired with a VR Ready Laptop, in just a few minutes you can have your desktop class VR demo running on a train, an airplane, and in half a dozen other places that you can’t set up an HTC Vive pro. With the perceived resolution of 1233 dpi you are approaching Pimax 5k resolution appearance wise, but with a smaller 110 fov, and with less demand on your computers graphics card because you are ultimately serving half as many pixels.
You may be asking well why aren’t we getting an incremental upgrade on the Oculus Rift every single year? Why has it been two years and a half years since the Oculus Rift CV1 hit the market and Oculus is still selling the exact same hardware? Well part of it has to do with hitting a lower price point, every year the Oculus Rift keeps on getting cheaper, which potentially means more people will buy it, potentially, but not necessarily.
The following video will reveal all the information you want to know about the Samsung HMD Odyssey+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8oJe_NgMvA
Five months into the year on May 2018 at F8 Mark Zuckerberg said this has been an intense year. Right around that time Facebook saw a high profile staff exit from WhatsApp Co-founder Jan Koum, and then six months later the Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left. Now Brendan Iribe leaves because Oculus isn’t shipping Oculus Rift upgrades on a schedule that at least matches what Samsung is doing, and here we are in October 2018 two and a half years from the Oculus Rift launch in March 28, 2016. You have to try to imagine Brendan’s possible frustration, the frustration of a founder, who was once the guy calling the shots at the top, a place perhaps where he is able to give a green light to choices that are perhaps very risky for a big company to make, the kinds of choices that startups make, and you have to imagine him being boxed in by the needs of a corporation to achieve extremely intense goals, to serve a billion users in VR, that’s why Google started with Google Cardboard, because they wanted to race to the bottom to serve as many people as possible. Yet Oculus was like ‘no, we want to do Gear VR, we want to do the highest quality VR and if it costs a little more that’s the right way to do it’. The original Oculus wasn’t trying to serve a billion users, that idea came later, with Facebook. There is some obvious grand metaphorical conflict from trying to race to serve a billion users, like Google did with Google Cardboard, and trying to build the best VR experience possible which is what Brendan’s Oculus did with Gear VR and then CV1. So now that Brendan is leaving Oculus, what else is going to happen to cap off an already intense year for Facebook?
At the beginning of the year Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress, the US Government was accusing him of being fast and loose with consumer information that the US Government it turns out stole to win the 2016 Election.
Bloomberg News it turns out has been the mouthpiece of the Trump administration, they are lying and deceiving the people of the United States and the world with their article about tiny spy chips put into the server boards of every Silicon Valley tech company from Apple to Amazon.
Amazon, SuperMicro, and Apple are calling on Bloomberg to retract their false and misleading story told to them by the US Government.
The Bloomberg/Trump agenda here is about putting more Silicon Valley companies under the thumb of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile Brendan has to watch Samsung release new VR headsets every year. Meanwhile Samsung appears to be trying to one up the Oculus Quest with it’s yet to be announced AR headset featuring a Qualcomm 855 Chipset.
So here we are in October 2018 with Samsung about to release one great new VR product and possibly on the verge of announcing a major new AR product at SDC 2018
I really love the Oculus Go and I am really excited about the Oculus Quest product which I really believe will become the first mainstream device, but I hope Oculus is paying attention because Samsung is making some great moves that I think are good for the whole VR industry.
For all their faults, for all the criticism’s people had of them, I think it should be remembered that Oculus cared about the entire VR industry, they never wanted to crush their opponents, they wanted VR to succeed for everyone, and they still do, even if the leader of the VR market ends up being Samsung or some other VR company.
Thank you Brendan Iribe for caring about the whole VR industry when you were at Oculus! I hope you continue to care about VR after your break from 20 years of work. Thank you for your service! Thanks in part to the original Oculus team, and thanks in part to the current Oculus team VR will benefit all mankind!
