What visors, what platforms?

The technical and commercial landscape of mainstream solutions for VR is continuously evolving. As a starting point for our further discussions in the next months, we would like to point out the main basic approaches that nowadays are available to generic users:

• Solutions using a visor attached to a desktop workstation (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Playstation VR the most known)
• Solutions using a smartphone within a visor (Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, ZEISS VR ONE and many others)

The former are more expensive and require a cable connection to the desktop machine, but can offer a better graphic rendering, smoothest animations, a more precise positioning.
The latter are cheaper and don’t require any cables, at the cost of a not-state-of-the-art performance, at various levels.
The former are eligible mostly for hardcore gamers and applications where performance and rendition fidelity are mostly important.
The latter are for casual gamers and places where a low TCO (total cost of ownership) is required, since in this case is meant that the solution provider only owns the visors (the cheapest part) while the smartphone, as an omnipresent all-around device, comes with the user (following the ‘BYOD’ – Bring Your Own Device approach). Of course this is the best approach for institutions like museums and schools.
Very recently, other approaches are emerging in the market, allowing mixed solutions to solve the respective weaknesses, as the ZEISS VR ONE Connect and the HTC Vive Cloud VR Service.
In the following posts, we’ll follow those proposals and their evolutions, trying to understand the actual added value for their final users and future availability on the market.
Stay tuned!