gear vr – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

April 23, 2024

Oculus Founder Reacts to Horizon OS News: “Hopefully it isn’t too late”

Meta dropped a major announcement yesterday, saying it plans to allow select partners to build third-party headsets that will run Horizon OS (formerly Quest OS). The news is prompting significant discussion within the XR industry, including from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.

Here’s a quick primer for those of you who are newer to XR industry. What eventually became the ‘Quest’ headset and ‘Horizon OS’ platform from Meta started when the company bought a VR startup called Oculus back in 2014. Oculus was founded by Palmer Luckey, who was a prominent voice in the XR industry before ultimately being pushed out of Facebook over divisive politics. Although he went on to found a military defense technology company after his ousting, Luckey remains an influential voice within the XR industry—even if he did build a headset designed to kill the wearer.

So that brings us to this week’s Horizon OS news; the biggest move that Meta has made with its XR strategy in years. The company says it will allow select partners to build their own headsets which will run Horizon OS, with the hope that the range of headset choices will expand while sharing a common software platform for users and developers. Although it’s still far from this vision, this is Meta’s first major step toward its stated goal of wanting to be the ‘Android of XR’.

What does Oculus founder Palmer Luckey make of the news? Well, it’s an ‘I told you so’ moment a decade in the making.

Luckey tells Road to VR that opening up the platform to third-party headset makers was “explicitly our plan over ten years ago, but Facebook would later pivot Oculus hard away from it.”

He points to an interview from 2014 in which Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus at the time, reasoned, “if we do want to get a billion people on virtual reality, which is our goal, we’re not going to sell 1 billion pairs of glasses ourselves. We are openly talking to any kind of partner that wants to jump into VR, and there’s a lot of interest right now.”

Gear VR was the first Oculus headset made by a third-party

And the company did in fact pursue that strategy. In 2015 Oculus teamed up with Samsung which released Gear VR, a headset ‘shell’ which worked by slotting a Samsung phone into the device to function as the brains and display of the headset. The headset’s software platform, however, was made by Oculus. Samsung released several iterations of Gear VR over the years but ultimately the effort didn’t find product-market fit, and Samsung discontinued the devices.

Today Luckey says, “I always strongly believed that Oculus should endeavor to build a technology platform that powered/supported every headset, even competitors like [HTC] Vive. […] this was always the correct strategy. Hopefully it isn’t too late.”

The post Oculus Founder Reacts to Horizon OS News: “Hopefully it isn’t too late” appeared first on Road to VR.

July 13, 2020

Wands Gets Roomscale, Dual-Wielding, Discontinues Gear VR Support

Cortopia’s Wands is the second VR game this month to discontinue Gear VR support.

The developer will no longer issue updates to one of the original versions of the game as it rolls out significant improvements to other platforms. “Unfortunately, we have to discontinue updates for Gear VR, as the Oculus SDK Wands uses is not supported,” a note on the game’s website reads. Last week we reported the Mojang’s Minecraft was also discontinuing support for Gear VR. The headset, which launched in its original form in 2014, is now all but dead after Facebook removed support in its Oculus SDK and Samsung stopped making phones compatible with it.

But Wands is far from done; in this month’s update, the game finally gets support for major features like roomscale and dual-wielding.

Wands originally launched on Daydream and Gear VR, where roomscale tracking isn’t available. But with Daydream dead and Gear VR left behind, Oculus Go is the only three degrees of freedom (3DOF) platform the game still supports. The roomscale update allows players on 6DOF platforms like Quest, Rift, Vive, Index, Cosmos and Windows Mixed Reality to navigate wider physical spaces in the virtual environments. No PSVR support is mentioned, though the kit isn’t really capable of roomscale tracking.

Dual-wielding, meanwhile, lets players load up spells in two hands for new combinations out on the battlefield. To top it all off, Cortopia has overhauled some of the game’s other stats and features to account for the new play options.

Will you be checking out the new Wands update? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Wands Gets Roomscale, Dual-Wielding, Discontinues Gear VR Support appeared first on UploadVR.

June 24, 2020

Facebook is Retiring Oculus Go, Announces New Content Distribution Platform for Quest

Facebook announced that, at the end of this year, it will officially retire Oculus Go, its 3DOF standalone headset. In early 2021, the company will also be making way for more apps on Quest with a new content distribution platform that will be separate from the Oculus Store.

The company won’t be releasing any new first-party features for Go, effective immediately, the company says in a blog post. Facebook will also be tuning down the headset’s third-party content pipeline later in the year, as the company will no longer accept any new Go apps or app updates after December 4th. No new Go apps will be permitted onto the Oculus Store after December 18th, putting a final lid on the growth of the Go’s content library.

The headset’s system software will however still receive bug fixes and security patches through 2022.

Oculus Go & Gear VR, Photo by Road to VR

Facebook says the move to retire Go is about pushing towards a “future of VR with 6DOF platforms like Oculus Quest.” This presumably also means that Go will be the company’s last 3DOF headset offering.

“As the technology has advanced rapidly since we launched Go, you’ve helped us prove out the value of positional tracking with the incredible experiences you’ve built for 6DOF VR, and we’re ready to double down on that,” the company says in a developer blog post.

Released in May 2018, Oculus Go was hailed as a VR headset priced for the masses. Although hobbled by its rotation-only headtracking and single non-positionally tracked controller, Go was championed for its low price-point of $200 and ability to serve up casual games and traditional streaming content, such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

Opening the Gates for Quest Content

There’s been a greater number of Quest apps to hit the Store recently, however the headset’s library of games is still dwarfed in comparison to both Oculus Go or Oculus Rift.

Facebook has been notably more strict with which apps it allows on Quest since the headset’s launch in mid-2019, as there are both technical hurdles and the apparent need to keep a manicured storefront for new users.

Early next year, the company says it will offer a new way to distribute content on Quest, which will allow developers to share their apps to anyone with a Quest.

Details are still thin on the ground, however Facebook appears to be creating an alternative marketplace with a lower technical acceptance threshold than the Oculus Store. Unlike sideloaded apps though, content accepted through this channel will still need to adhere to its Oculus Platform policies and Oculus Content policies.

“By making it easier for more developers to reach Quest owners in the future, we hope to spark inspiration with those who will build the next wave of engaging experiences for Quest,” the company says.

In practice, this may act as a way to stymie sideload-based content stores such as SideQuest, and bring all developers under the same roof, so to speak. Additionally, the still unnamed content channel could act as an avenue for Early Access content, or simply an updated of the old Oculus Share platform back in the heady developer kit days. The company says it will be sharing more info on the new content channel in the future.

The post Facebook is Retiring Oculus Go, Announces New Content Distribution Platform for Quest appeared first on Road to VR.

May 15, 2020

Samsung is Terminating Its VR Video Apps on All Devices

With the end of Samsung Gear VR, it seems the South Korean tech giant is also doing away with its VR video apps as well. The company is ending service for all of its Samsung XR apps across the web, mobile, and VR headset platforms.

The company quietly issued an update on the Samsung XR website on Monday, stating that all of its XR services will terminate on September 30th, 2020. The news was first covered by CNET.

Samsung XR (ex-Samsung VR) is the company’s VR video hosting platform which featured both premium and user-uploaded content.

At the time of this writing, Samsung has already pulled the plug on 360 degree video uploads and premium video purchases, and has stopped updates all Samsung XR and Samsung VR Video clients.

Facebook Ends Samsung Gear VR Software Updates, 360 Video Downloads & Films

Facebook is ending software updates for the Samsung Gear VR. Further, users will no longer be able to access films or download the Oculus Video app.

The Samsung Gear VR is a smartphone-based VR headset. Like Google Cardboard and its plastic derivatives, users slot in their smartphone which acts as the display and computer. Unlike cardboard, however, it features a dedicated gyroscope and accelerometer, and runs the same Oculus mobile platform and store as the Oculus Go.

The first Gear VR was released in late 2014 for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4. While labeled an ‘Innovator Edition’, the product was essentially the first modern consumer VR headset.

Over the years, new versions were released to support the latest Samsung phones. The headset did not change significantly, other than the inclusion of a 3DoF controller from 2017 onward.

No Updates, No Films, No New 360 Video Users

Samsung phones will no longer receive new Gear VR features via Oculus OS updates.

From today, the Oculus Video and Oculus 360 Photos apps will no longer be able to be downloaded on Gear VR. If you already have those apps installed on your phone you can continue to use them, but rented and purchased films will no longer be available. Existing users with purchased films should receive Oculus Store credit “equivalent to the cost you paid for any titles you bought,” according to Facebook. Users should be able to continue to use other film services like Netflix, Prime Video, and Fandango Now, but we should note that some developers who supported Gear VR stopped once it became clear Facebook wasn’t going to update the platform anymore.

The included Oculus Browser will no longer be updated. In Facebook’s own words, this may introduce “an increased security risk, as with using any out-of-date web browser”. At Oculus Connect conferences, the browser has been said to be one of the top used apps on mobile VR.

Samsung’s own Samsung Internet is available on Gear VR, but hasn’t been updated since April 2019. Other third party browsers exist on the store, but with low user ratings.

From September 15, developers will no longer be able to support Gear VR on new apps released to the Oculus Store.

Gear VR Was Already Dead

The announcement won’t be a surprise to those following the Gear VR in months.

At Oculus Connect 6 back in September 2019, Oculus’ then-CTO John Carmack essentially declared the Gear VR dead.

This was prompted by the news that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 would not support VR. The Galaxy S20 followed suit this year, ending Samsung’s support of the platform.

Google’s competing Daydream smartphone VR platform is also essentially dead, with neither the Pixel 3a nor Pixel 4 supporting it and sales of the headset itself ending.

In December the Oculus SDK dropped support for Gear VR, and in January the Unity engine, used to make most VR apps, deprecated support.

Smartphone-based VR created a lot of problems. The time it takes to slot in and out the phone, and the fact the user’s phone is unusable while docked into the headset, makes people less likely to want to use VR on a regular basis. A Gear VR session could also end after a matter of minutes, depending on the device and conditions in which it is used, due to the phone’s processor reaching its thermal limits. Smartphones pack all of their components into an incredibly small space. While Samsung improves its passive cooling design almost every year, there are physical limitations which can’t be overcome packing VR into a device designed first as a phone.

Standalone VR headsets, though, incorporate the screens and computing hardware and are designed for better cooling. Despite standalones having roughly the same graphical limitations as smartphone VR, Carmack claimed that the Oculus Go saw Rift-like retention levels, whereas Gear VR’s was much lower.

Facebook previously stopped production of cables for the original Oculus Rift, leaving many owners with no repair option when it breaks. Oculus Go’s social features were dropped late last year. Facebook said Quest will be supported “for years to come”, but Go looks like it may be on the way out.

The post Facebook Ends Samsung Gear VR Software Updates, 360 Video Downloads & Films appeared first on UploadVR.

January 25, 2020

Unity Deprecates Built-In Support For Daydream, Gear VR, And Valve’s OpenVR

Unity 2019.3 introduces a new plugin system for XR headsets, and deprecates official support for Gear VR, Google VR, and Valve’s OpenVR (the API for SteamVR).

Valve is working on a plugin for the new system, according to Unity:

“Valve is using our XR SDK to develop their OpenVR Unity XR plugin for 2019.3 and beyond,” the blog post from Unity explains. “They will share more information on where to access it once it is available. Until that plugin is available, built-in support of OpenVR will continue to be functional and available in 2019.3, and we will support our users with any critical fixes.”

What This Doesn’t (Yet) Mean

This doesn’t yet mean that developers can no longer build Unity games for these platforms. For now, it simply means that bugs & issues introduced by the engine which affect the support for these platforms “may not be prioritized”. This also serves as a warning that they will be removed from the engine in the future.

That actual removal won’t happen until version 2020.1. Despite using years in version numbers, 2019.3 has yet to be officially released, so 2020.1 is likely months away.

Of course, developers can continue to use older versions of Unity to build their games — although obviously that means they won’t have access to new & future engine-level features and optimizations.

The New Unity Plugin System

The new XR plugin system is intended to simplify the way VR and AR works across the various platforms in Unity in the long term, and allow for new XR features and software plugins to work across all VR & AR hardware.

Under the new system, Unity is “officially” working with 7 XR platforms: Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, Microsoft’s HoloLens & WMR, Magic Leap, Oculus, and PlayStation VR.

These platforms are “fully supported” by Unity, and the company is “directly” working with them on “deep platform integration, improvements to our engine, and optimizations to our XR tech stack for the platform”.

Valve?

Notably absent from the list of officially supported platform partners is Valve, the company behind the popular SteamVR platform.

However, the new plugin system does allow third parties to develop XR plugins for Unity separately from official support.

Valve’s application programming interface (API) for SteamVR is called OpenVR. According to Unity, Valve is “currently developing their OpenVR XR Plugin, and they will share more information on where to access it once it is available“.

There are two Unity designations Valve could be delivering this system through. One is as a ‘Verified Solutions Partner’ (VSP) and the other is as an ‘Innovator’. Being a VSP “offers various levels of support, including test verification and promotion of the plugin once released.” It has not yet been revealed whether or not Valve is a VSP.

Will This Really Matter?

There are no announced plans for an unofficial plugin for Daydream or Gear VR, however, there are plans for an open source plugin for Google Cardboard. This means developers will eventually have to resort to non-current versions of Unity to develop for Daydream or Gear VR.

For SteamVR, the change means that responsibility for support of Valve’s platform in Unity now rests solely on Valve. It also may make it more difficult for Valve to work around engine-level bugs or introduce new features that require engine support.

Unity’s own OpenVR Plugin is now deprecated, and will be removed in 2020.1.

At the end of the day, however, this probably won’t really mean much to the average SteamVR developer other than the fact that the party responsible for the core OpenVR support in the engine changed.

It could be argued that a lack of official support would be important to large publishers/developers choosing which platforms to develop for, but even this seems like a stretch for now.

We’ve reached out to Valve for clarity on the current state of its relationship with Unity, plans for future support, and any other statement on the topic. We’ll update this article if we receive a reply.

The post Unity Deprecates Built-In Support For Daydream, Gear VR, And Valve’s OpenVR appeared first on UploadVR.

December 6, 2019

Oculus SDK Drops Support For Samsung Gear VR

Recent versions of the Oculus Mobile SDK drop support for the Samsung Gear VR mobile headset.

This means that if developers want to continue to support Gear VR in their future app updates, they won’t be able to leverage new Oculus SDK features or bug fixes.

According to Facebook’s FAQ on the topic, existing Gear VR apps can still be downloaded. However, the company doesn’t mention what exactly will happen if a developer releases an update with the latest SDK version. We assume that Gear VR owners will be served the last compatible version, but we’ve reached out to Facebook to confirm.

This could present a huge problem for multiplayer games and apps which support the Gear VR. Developers may be forced to drop multiplayer support for Gear VR if they need to update their Oculus SDK to take advantage of newer features such as finger tracking for Quest.

Gear VR’s Eulogy

At Oculus Connect 6 back in September, Oculus’ then-CTO John Carmack essentially declared the Gear VR dead.

This was prompted by the news that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 will not support VR, and speculation that the regular Galaxy S line will follow suit next year.

Google’s competing Daydream smartphone VR platform is also essentially dead, with neither the Pixel 3a nor Pixel 4 supporting it and sales of the headset itself ending.

Smartphone-based VR created a lot of problems. The time it takes to slot in and out the phone, and the fact the user’s phone is unusable while docked into the headset, makes people less likely to want to use VR on a regular basis. A Gear VR session could also end after a matter of minutes, depending on device and conditions, due to the phone’s processor reaching its thermal limits. Smartphones pack all of their components into an incredibly small space. While Samsung improves its passive cooling design almost every year, there are physical limitations which can’t be overcome packing VR into a device designed first as a phone.

Standalone VR headsets, though, incorporate the screens and computing hardware and are designed for better cooling. Despite standalones having roughly the same graphical limitations as smartphone VR, Oculus CTO John Carmack claims that the Oculus Go sees Rift-like retention levels, whereas Gear VR’s was much lower.

The post Oculus SDK Drops Support For Samsung Gear VR appeared first on UploadVR.

October 6, 2019

The Eulogy for Slot-in VR

At Facebook’s Oculus Connect 6 VR developer’s conference the company’s technical leader John Carmack gave a talk about Gear VR and the failings of slot-in VR. While I agree with many of his assertions about Gear VR and slot-in VR, he only touched on a few issues that slot-in VR had that ultimately doomed the technology before it ever had a chance of taking off. I personally used nearly every version of the Gear VR and Google Daydream, so I am very familiar with the pitfalls of the technology and why standalone VR seemed like the correct solution years ago.

Smartphone Thermals

Fundamentally, smartphones are poorly designed for VR.

Yes, they can pretty much do anything for 5 minutes without any issues, but short 5-minute VR experiences are not enough to support an entire industry and thus, longer experiences are needed. The problem is that slot-in VR is fundamentally limited to no more than about 30 minutes of usage, which is when most headsets will start to throttle the device or warn that performance is no longer acceptable for VR. With each generation of slot-in VR, they got closer and closer to 30 minutes of continuous usage, but I assume that’s probably possible with something like a Note9 having more surface area to dissipate heat and a more power efficient system on a chip. Speaking of the SoC, one of the biggest problems that smartphones had for VR is that nearly all smartphones and their thermal designs are specifically designed for bursty workloads, not sustained ones. Over time, SoCs and the GPUs in them from Qualcomm and ARM got better at sustained workloads, but that was never a stated goal until VR happened. Even so, running the SoC at full bore for 30 minutes heated up the device significantly and that paired with having the display at nearly full brightness and running 100% of the time resulted in some very poor thermals. Having the SoC so close to the display because of the tightness of a smartphone design only made thermals worse because both components got hot and heated up one another. Only recently have we seen devices like these gaming phones with improved cooling and active cooling, but even so, gaming is going to give the device better cooling because it isn’t locked inside of a VR headset without much airflow.

Ease of Use

There were some good things about slot-in VR, for example with Daydream, you could simply open up the headset and place your phone inside and close it up and the headset would recognize the phone and vice versa and it would work relatively reliably. However, carrying around a headset with you everywhere that you took your phone was problematic and standalone does not solve this problem, but it also improves the experience even more by adding 6DoF and two controllers, so it is almost an entirely different class of experience. There were also compatibility issues between versions of Gear VR and which smartphones fit in which and their USB connectors. This was less of an issue for Daydream and more of an issue for Gear VR, but at a certain point even Daydream looked silly with some larger sized phones. Audio quality also suffered as phone speakers weren’t a great sounding solution and using headphones adds complexity. Dust was also an issue for me because every time you opened the headset to put the phone in, you introduced more dust and I found bits of dust to be very distracting in darker scenes with small bright light sources like text. Another killer problem that slot-in smartphone VR had was the ‘case’ issue, which is that smartphones are very fragile devices so most people have their phones in cases and most VR headsets weren’t designed to accommodate. That means taking your phone out of its case, which in some cases results in dropping your phone as you remove it from the case and try to transfer it into the VR headset.

Content

While I expect that lots of content from slot-in VR headsets will waterfall into standalone headsets like the Go and Quest, there’s no denying that the 3DoF nature of the Gear VR limited what kind of content could be viewed optimally. The best content for these headsets would be 3D 180 or 360 content, which has struggled to take off. I have seen some amazing 360 and 180 content as well as 3D 180 content, but the reality is that there aren’t enough headsets out there yet to entice content creators to aggressively pursue the format. As such, many of the standalone headsets had limited content experiences, partially limited by what kinds of controllers they utilized. The Gear VR and Daydream headsets both had coarse 3DoF controllers, which were great for navigating menus, but not necessarily great for gaming or social interactions. Having Google and Facebook segment the markets with their own content ecosystems didn’t help the situation either, but now Daydream appears as good as dead and mobile VR developers are mostly focused on Quest.

Never Meant to Be

I think I realized slot-in smartphone VR was dead around the time the second generation of Google’s Daydream rolled around and I had realized that while they made many improvements, there were still some fundamental issues that simply hadn’t been addressed. I’ve been advising companies to focus on standalone, and I’m glad I did. That said, I do believe that VR headsets that are powered by a smartphone via USB Type-C cable are a much more viable alternative to slot-in VR and should still deliver a high-quality experience. It would also speed up the ability of the VR headsets to gain access to 5G networks and faster SoCs.

Currently, the Snapdragon 855+ in devices like the OnePlus 7T and ROG II phone are scoring about 7,100 points in 3DMark’s Slingshot Extreme graphics test, while devices like the OnePlus 5T (running the same OS version) with a Snapdragon 835 is only getting 3800, slightly more than half. This is relevant because the Oculus Quest has a Snapdragon 835 which is a little more than half the performance of the fastest Android phones available today. That means a phone from today connected to a VR headset via cable would most likely consume less power and generate less heat than anticipated due to not needing to run very fast and probably still have better graphics than an Oculus Quest or Mirage Solo. Phone batteries have also grown, which should also handle prolonged usage better than previous generations.

Overall, slot-in smartphone-based VR headsets were a great way to start the growth of mobile VR. While nobody can for sure say they know what the future holds, it is pretty certain that smartphone slot-in VR is done and gone and Oculus killing Gear VR is probably the final nail in that coffin.

The post The Eulogy for Slot-in VR appeared first on UploadVR.

September 26, 2019

OC6: John Carmack Admits Gear VR Is Dead, Gives It A Eulogy

At Oculus Connect 6, Oculus CTO John Carmack admitted that the Gear VR is dead.

The Samsung Gear VR is a smartphone-based VR headset. Like Google Cardboard and its plastic derrivatives, users slot in their smartphone which acts as the display and computer. Unlike cardboard, however, it features a dedicated gyroscope and accelerometer, and runs the same Oculus Mobile platform and store as the Oculus Go.

Speaking in his annual keynote, Carmack gave what he described as “a eulogy” for the Samsung-made Oculus-powered headset. This was prompted by the recent news that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 will not support VR, and speculation that the regular Galaxy S line will follow suit.

I do think that we missed an opportunity here. I invested a whole lot of effort into it and it’s the foundation that we’ve built all the mobile things off of. But looking back it’s clear we had huge unit volumes […] much larger than all our other headsets. And it had good reviews, people liked it. But it was not retentive. I mean the retention we have Quest, Rift S, Rift, Go, and then Gear VR is way lower.

Carmack explained several ways in which Facebook could have tried to recover the momentum of Gear VR, but ultimately the company decided to pivot to pushing standalone headsets which don’t share the main issues of smartphone VR.

Is Smartphone VR Completely Dead?

Gear VR’s direct competitor, Daydream, is also facing a questionable future. Google hasn’t updated the device or meaningfully updated the system software in over a year. Worse, the stream of content has slowed down to the point where the store hasn’t featured a “New & Updated” category since 2018. Google even dropped its own movie service from the platform.

The recently released Pixel 3a doesn’t support Daydream either, with Google saying this is due to the hardware not being up to task.

Smartphone-based VR created a lot of problems. The time it takes to slot in and out the phone, and the fact the user’s phone is unusable while docked into the headset, makes people less likely to want to use VR on a regular basis. A Gear VR session could also end after a matter of minutes, depending on device and conditions, due to the phone’s processor reaching its thermal limits. Smartphones pack all of their components into an incredibly small space. While Samsung improves its passive cooling design almost every year, there are physical limitations which can’t be overcome packing VR into a device designed first as a phone.

oculus quest oculus go

Standalone VR headsets, though, incorporate the screens and computing hardware and are designed for better cooling. Despite standalones with roughly the same graphical limitations as smartphone VR, Oculus CTO John Carmack claims that the standalone Oculus Go sees Rift-like retention levels, whereas Gear VR’s was much lower. Facebook also makes the Oculus Quest standalone with a pair of hand controllers for gaming. Facebook’s VP of Special Gaming Strategies Jason Rubin recently questioned whether Oculus Go’s “media use case” is “worth expanding upon, doubling down upon, continuing with?”

The post OC6: John Carmack Admits Gear VR Is Dead, Gives It A Eulogy appeared first on UploadVR.

September 26, 2019

Oculus CTO Explains Why “Gear VR’s days are numbered”

Oculus CTO John Carmack took to the stage at Oculus Connect 6 to give his patented stream-of-thought speech. Here, he gave what he called a “eulogy for Gear VR,” as he detailed the failings, and some of the harder truths that both he and the company had to face in what turned out to be a less performant return on investment.

If you know anything about Gear VR, you know it was a bit of a Frankenstein hardware platform. Along with newer Samsung smartphones came the need to rejigger the headset to make use of them, although that’s not the biggest issue that lead to ultimately worse retention that all other Oculus VR headsets on offer.

“It was the classic leaky bucket that growth companies are advised not to pour effort into,” Carmack lamented. “We did pour a lot of money into the content there. There was significant amounts of money spent on content, and when I would look at a spreadsheet on where all of it went, and some of the apps that did almost nothing, it’s kind of sad.”

In comparison to Rift, Rift S, Quest, and Go, Gear VR retention was “way lower,” he revealed. Although Gear VR runs basically the same content as Oculus Go, Carmack posits that user friction was the big sticking point, and that early concerns around battery life—Gear VR draws from the smartphone’s battery—were somewhat overblown.

“In retrospect, the people draining their battery […] were playing in VR and having a good time, and that wasn’t really driving them away,” he explained. Instead, Carmack says, the issue of poor user retention was more based on the fact that users had to get their phones out of their pockets, pull off cases, mount and dock it.

“There was a lot of things we could have done. The docking was fiddly. The mounting was fiddly. There were all sorts of software things that we could have done a lot better.”

Carmack admits that Google Daydream’s holder was better than Gear VR simply because it held the smartphone in place, and didn’t require physical docking—something that was needed with Gear VR in the early days due to the lack of high precision IMUs in compatible Samsung phones.