The Price Of VR: How Long Before China Wakes Up?
This is the Samsung Gear VR:
It has a no-brainer Impulse Buy price of just US$99.
But …
… it requires a premium Samsung phone — S6, Note 5, S6 Edge, S6 Edge Plus — that costs a multiple of that:
And who the hell wants to waste a phone like that?
This is a huge opportunity for China to:
1) Develop a non-phone VR stick-in for a visor
2) Develop a visor into which multiple brands of phones can be inserted
Imagine buying a US$99 VR visor to use with a China-brand US$150 non-phone with a 4K screen!
That would be the biggest computing earthquake in human history.
Setting aside the Cheap & Nasty no-label Shenzhen factories — who gave us the Exploding Hoverboard — the one company that could pull this off would be Xiaomi.
And it should be their entry into the American marketplace.
No cellphone patent bullshit to deal with.
Same-day update: I am chagrined. xico2kx in Comments points out that China has been on it. I didn’t research it. VR hasn’t been on my radar until now and tablet sites in China tend not to cover it. Of all the visors (goggles? headsets?) listed here — at really low prices but with frustrating shipping times — the only brand name on that first page I would trust is LeTV (aka LeEco). And now I see there’s a whole new set of specs I have to study and see which are the best. Including weight!
No comments:
Post a Comment