Samsung hasn’t really said much about VR since the release of Samsung Odyssey+, the hardware refresh to its Windows Mixed Reality headset that came to market in October 2018. However at Augmented World Expo (AWE), the company offered a few brief statements to underline their continued commitment to the space. In short: Samsung has more AR/VR products coming down the pipeline.
Farshid Fallah, Samsung’s director of developer relations for XR and gaming, took the stage at an AWE panel talk on Thursday to talk a bit about the upcoming AR capabilities for Galaxy S10.
As reported by Variety, Fallah remarked the company has plans to release “multiple AR and VR products” over the coming months.
While Fallah maintained that “Gear VR was a good entry point” for the company, he however admitted “things have moved on” since its initial consumer release in 2015.
Case in point: the latest version of the Gear VR headset itself was released in 2017. While it does technically support an impressive 14 different smartphones from the company, the entrance of dedicated standalone VR headsets from Oculus seems to have taken the wind out of Samsung’s collective mobile VR sails.
Fallah however further suggested that it’s not over yet for a ‘Gear’ branded AR/VR devices. “We have other plans for Gear,” he said.
Whatever the case, we’re hoping to finally learn more about what happened to what the company dubbed “next mobile VR system” back at Samsung Developer Conference 2017, where they spoke about a hypothetical 6DOF standalone headset that would, for all intents and purposes, be positioned to compete with Oculus Quest.
