Following earlier reports that Samsung is moving ahead with plans to release a new standalone successor to their GearVR, new details have emerged about the company’s second swing at virtual reality.
As reported by The Verge and Liliputing, the headset – or at least the prototype for it – now has both a name and a specs-sheet.
Shown at this year’s MWC Shanghai, the Exyson VR III is an all-in-one headset features a 10nm hexa-core processor with two Samsung M2 CPU cores clocked at 2.5 GHz, four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.7 GHz, ARM Mali G71 MP20 graphics and a dual WQHD+ display with a screen refresh rate of 90 fps.
Sensor-wise, it’s said to come capable of both hand-tracking, gaze-tracking and facial expression recognition.
No word yet on inside-out motion tracking nor when, or if, the headset will make it to market.
However, past rumors have suggested 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.
