Virtual reality has gotten a lot of hype in the last year or so, and so far there’s basically three ways to implement virtual reality: smartphone + VR headset, all-in-one headset, and PC + headset. Currently the former is the most popular option as it’s much cheaper than the other two, while PC based virtual reality provides the best user experience, but it’s quite pricey. Allwinner is now at Computex 2016 promoting their virtual reality solutions, and they see smartphone based VR peak in 2018, PC based VR have a slower growth, with All-in-one VR becoming the dominant force in 2020 and beyond.
So the company is focusing on all-in-one Android VR headsets, starting with H8vr board featuring Allwinner H8 octa-core processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage, and mainly targeting 4K virtual reality videos, since the performance of current mobile processors does not really provide a good experience for games. Allwinner claims to have 20 partners working on their H8vr solutions, and boasts low power consumption, lower weight, low heat, low lag (< 20 ms), and long battery life with over 3 hours of video playback.
Beyong H8vr available now, Allwinner has two new VR solutions in the pipeline for late 2016 and 2017:
- Allwinner VR9 (Q4 2016) – Four times the performance over H8vr and mobile VR game support
- Allwinner VR10 (Q2 2017) – LTE and artificial intelligence support, 50% lower power consumption and twice the performance of VR9.
Charbax talked with the company at Computex 2016 about their current and future virtual reality plans, as well as 360 degree video recording solutions based on Allwinner V3 processor.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I think that they need inside-out positional tracking (via example integrated depth camera and computer vision engine) before VR based on a mobile platform will be successfull.
Looks really interesting. I’ve seen that Geekbuying already has it on sale, surprisingly.
@Dartigo
They’ve removed the link -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Jmzy3SHGD8J:www.geekbuying.com/item/V3-Allwinner-H8VR-Octa-Core-2-0GHz-2G-16G-WIFI-5-5-Inches-1080P-FHD-Display-Immersive-3D-VR-Virtual-Reality-All-In-One-Headset-368256.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=th&client=ubuntu
The kit sold for $119.99.
They’ve also added the V3 360 camera shown at the end of the video ($101) -> http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Allminner-DV-X5-Action-Camera-Mini-VR-Camera-360-Degrees-Wide-Angle-AllwinnerV3-Sony-IMX179-4K-30fps-Sport-Camera—Blue-368301.html
But the H8VR on Geekbuying has a 1080p screen resolution. I hope it is an error in the product description and the real unit has 4k display. Otherwise it would be a really big disappointment and there would be no reason to buy it. Instead one can get one of the $12 cardboard headsets and use the 1080p smartphone…