Oculus VR, the Facebook-owned company behind Oculus Rift, has released the mobile software development kit for Samsung's Gear VR Innovator Edition headset.
Oculus worked with Samsung to create the Gear VR - which relies on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to run - and is responsible for the Oculus Mobile software used by the headset. The SDK was co-developed with Samsung specifically for the Gear VR to bring made-for-VR apps to the device in time for its December launch.
Tucked inside the SDK is the full source code for three VR applications: Oculus Cinema, Oculus 360 Photos and Oculus 360 Videos. Each with an open licence so developers can modify or change any part in order to come up with their own creations.
Top gear
A blog post on the Oculus website lists features supported by the Oculus Mobile SDK including: Asynchronous Timewarp, direct front buffer rendering, GPU context priorities and real-time CPU threading, among other things.
Come December, once you've strapped your newly-unwrapped Gear VR Innovation Edition to your face, you'll see the Oculus Home screen (pictured above) welcoming you. It's the launch point for the content that both companies hope will be ready by launch day.
Two such examples include Titans of Space and Darknet. The former is a holographic guided tour of the planets designed to give you a sense of scale. While the latter is a puzzle/strategy game based around the cyberpunk genre. Like other development kits, Oculus has full guidelines for app submissions that can be viewed on the website.
In sum, we should start seeing some very cool applications of VR for mobile very soon.
- Interested in the Gear VR? Read our fully updated Samsung Gear VR review here.
