That it is. DK1 resolution was comparatively pretty awful. Even DK2 isn't great.
Crescent Bay and Gear VR felt fairly similar at GDC (rendering capabilities aside), so I'm really curious how much better the Rift CV1 is going to feel.
My time with Vive was very short, and felt so good I kinda forgot to look for flaws, but I hear CV1 is roughly the same (aka AWESOME!).
I heard at a VR conference that the CV1 is likely to use the Note 4 screen, but that's hearsay. I had stronger confirmation that it will at least be the same resolution... the Note 4, S6, etc all are 2560 x 1440; we were hoping for 4k but it's not gonna happen this cycle. CV2, perhaps?
(And there are no guarantees, so this could be wrong... but probably not.)
That is true, but the CV1 (consumer version) headset will have 2 separate screens that can be moved independently, which is something you can't get with a phone attached to a headset.
Not sure that feature will justify a $200+ price difference for most people. Plus, you will upgrade your phone every year or two anyway and get all the benefits (faster, better screen, improved features, etc) associated with that, while the CV1 will require a separate purchase to get new features.
"Plus, you will upgrade your phone every year or two"
Do normal people actually upgrade their phone yearly? I've kept my last several phones for about 3 years each, and I tend to think that'd be overkill for most folks (admittedly, I tend to buy higher end phones, with large storage, so they last a little longer; and I never buy on contract, so I'm paying full price, so I don't want to do it often).
The average lifetime of a smartphone increased last year from 18 months to slightly over 24. Analysts expect carrier and Apple leasing options to drive this back below 2 years.
My family has been on contract for last 10 years and so has most people I met in America. The subsidy means flag ship phones at ~$200 with 2 year contract, or a cheaper phone for free. The other part is that AT&T and Verizon had much more reliable signal so it wasn't worth going to another provider.
If this is the case, then I'm not sure Oculus was worth the money Facebook paid for them - Samsung seems to own all the relevant IP and it's not clear what Oculus provides that couldn't be replicated by another company in short order. If Oculus Gear takes off as a product, it seems like Chinese manufacturers would start churning out knockoffs and commoditize the product space.
The screen is only a small piece of the puzzle. Most of the value of the Oculus products comes from the insane software optimizations that have been done at all levels of the stack to bring down the latency.
Oculus owns a lot of the IP, and more importantly know-how. Evidently the Gear VR was the result of extremely tight integration between Samsung and Oculus engineering, with Oculus providing the bulk of the VR-specific knowledge. Samsung provided screens and phones.
Late in the game, the Oculus engineers pushed for major changes to the architecture to allow the phone to communicate with the sensors in the headset in a very low latency way -- something nearly bare metal. Evidently it took a lot of convincing.
(A friend heard this from Carmack in person, for what it's worth.)
[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Development+Kit+...