One of the drawbacks of the Samsung Gear VR is that it’s a bit of a walled garden — outside its social experiences, you’re mostly limited to playing games and watching videos. Tomorrow, though, Samsung is launching a beta version of what it calls “Samsung Internet for Gear VR.” It’s a virtual reality web browser that seems aimed at letting people stream videos from places like YouTube without going through a dedicated app, while providing general internet access.
Samsung is launching a Gear VR web browser
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
According to Samsung, the app “supports both 360-degree and 3D video streaming, as well as any HTML5 video from the web” — which hypothetically means users can either watch flat video or take advantage of YouTube’s various VR options. It supports voice recognition and an on-screen keyboard, and it’ll have a “gaze mode” that lets users simply stare at things to select them, instead of tapping the sometimes inconvenient side trackpad. Netflix’s Gear VR app already uses an on-screen keyboard, and gaze-based selection is common in apps and games like Land’s End. The app will also import bookmarks from the phone’s non-VR mobile browser.
Web browsers and other desktop interfaces are a common experimental genre for VR developers, from Virtual Desktop — which translates the whole Windows interface into VR — to JanusVR, which turns the internet into a series of walkable rooms. Samsung’s browser seems relatively simple, but if it works at all, it’ll be one of the first steps toward creating a workable mobile VR platform.
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