Using GPU in PC for GearVR

Question

Usually GearVR + SamsungPhone are used both for rendering and displaying but I would like to use it only for displaying when it is plugged to PC. The reason is to get performance similar to Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and not spend money for it. Is it possible?

Answer 1

Since you're asking in this Stack Exchange, I assume you intend to build a VR app yourself that utilizes this scenario.

While it is perfectly possible to utilize PC for rendering and stream the output to a mobile VR headset, it will come at the relatively high cost of increased latency (see e.g. here for why this is important; the tl;dr is that high latency → nausea). This is because wireless networks have intrinsically higher latency than wired ones, and you need to do the following in a loop:

1. Collect head tracking (gyroscope/accelerometer) data from the VR headset.
2. Send the head tracking data over the network to the PC.
3. Render a frame on the PC.
4. Stream the frame from the PC to the VR headset. This involves the following substeps:
   1. Encode video and audio on the PC.
   2. Transmit the encoded media frame to the VR headset over the network.
   3. Decode video and audio on the VR headset.

As I mentioned previously, steps 2 and 4 introduce additional latency (probably from several to a dozen milliseconds, from stream encoding/decoding and network transmission), which – depending on your specific application and the individual tolerance of the user – may or may not be a deal breaker.