Google releasing VR headset this year: report

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google is developing a new virtual-reality headset for smartphones, and adding extra support for the technology to its Android operating system, as it challenges Facebook's Oculus for an early lead in Silicon Valley’s latest platform war, The Financial Times reports.

The new headset will be a successor to Cardboard, the cheap-and-cheerful mobile VR viewer that Google launched in 2014, and feature better sensors, lenses and a more solid plastic casing, said people familiar with its plans. The smartphone-based device will be similar to the Gear VR, a collaboration between Samsung and Oculus that went on sale to consumers late last year.

Google is expected to release its rival headset, alongside new Android VR technology, this year. Like Cardboard and Gear VR, the new headset will use an existing smartphone, slotted into the device, for its display and most of its processing power.

Google Cardboard relies solely on sensors built into modern smartphones to detect the position of a user’s head, while Gear VR is more sturdily built and features extra motion sensors. The updated Google headset will be compatible with a much broader range of Android devices than Gear VR, which only works with a handful of recent Samsung Galaxy smartphone models, as the Alphabet unit tries to bring the technology to a wider audience.

Google is hoping to improve the quality of the mobile VR viewing experience by embedding new software directly into its Android smartphone operating system, rather than relying only on a traditional app as it does with Cardboard today. One issue with many current smartphone-based VR viewers is that users can feel dizzy or nauseous. This is because the virtual images displayed can lag slightly behind the user's head movements in the real world, known as latency.