Reports out of PocketNow and Digital Trends say that Samsung is moving ahead with plans to release a new standalone successor to their GearVR headset.
The new VR headset is said to have an ultra-sharp 2000ppi OLED display and integrated support for room-scale movement.
Some hand-tracking support was introduced to the GearVR in a refresh earlier this year. However, this aspect still lags behind the technology found in Oculus, HTC and Sony headsets in a big way. It’s expected that the move to a dedicated hardware would allow them to close the technical gap between them and the bigger players.
Rumors say it’ll potentially be released and marketed under the Samsung Odyssey gaming sub-brand, which debuted overseas earlier this year.
Of course, the biggest question here is what the headset’s dedicated nature means for the GearVR brand. Will GearVR be quietly retired in favor of this new dedicated solution or will this new headset act as an alternative designed exclusively for high-end use? Will it leverage its some sort of internal processing unit to generate VR experiences or will it rely on a PC or smartphone to do the heavy-lifting?
Depending on the which direction Samsung take things, it’ll likely be a move that keeps the company in line with rivals HTC and Lenovo – who have both recently announced they’ll be working with Google to produce a number of phone-less dedicated VR headsets.
