Smartphones and virtual reality just became inseparable

BARCELONA — Second day in at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the journalists are nervously staring at their laptop screens, looking for a theme or a topic to wrap up the week’s events and head home. Despite the event’s traditionally huge focus on mobile, it was hard to get excited about a new smartphone this year.

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve seen some beautiful smartphones (despite being similar to their predecessors, Samsung’s new Galaxy phones fall into the category) and some daring ones (we’re looking at you, modular LG G5), but this year’s show was more about the wearable gadgets that came with the phones than the phones themselves.

And no, we’re not talking about smartwatches — no one even mentioned those this year. No, the 2016 will be all about virtual reality, and not just the Oculus Rift and the Vive variety, plugged into a $1,500+ desktop PC. VR is going mobile this year.

Samsung took the lead here, filling its enormous Centre de Convencions Internacional event arena with thousands of Gear VR headsets, and showing a part of its presentation in VR. It was an unnerving feeling — one moment you’re surrounded by a throng of people, and then you put the headset on and it’s just you and a huge, floating 3D image of Samsung’s new phones. 

It was an unnerving feeling — one moment you’re surrounded by a throng of people, and then you put the headset on and it’s just you and a huge, floating 3D image of Samsung’s new phones.

The VR experience wasn’t just a publicity gimmick. If you pre-order a Samsung S7 or S7 Edge phone, you’ll get a Samsung Gear VR headset (a $100 value) thrown in free, meaning there will be a lot of people trying these out this year.

LG also has a virtual reality headset now, the LG 360 VR. It’s a lot lighter than Samsung’s, though we have some qualms about its build quality, and we don’t know the exact availability date or the price.

But the details don’t matter at this point. The fact is, two of the biggest names in mobile will be pushing VR hard this year. Another big smartphone name, HTC, has focused heavily on its Vive VR headset this year. Even though it’s not a mobile product, it’s getting better by leaps and bounds — the demos I’ve seen here in Barcelona (especially the new Space Pirates shootout game) were polished, fluid and, quite frankly, amazing. At this point it doesn’t look like HTC plans to connect the Vive to its smartphones, but it’s not that hard to imagine them doing so in the future. And we bet that some of the Chinese manufacturers will follow up with VR products of their own.

There was exciting news on the other end of the VR spectrum as well: Content creation. Both Samsung and LG launched 360-degree cameras, making it easy for everyone to create immersive content. Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg is heavily invested in this; according to him, the next thing that comes after video is the ability to share whole scenes. That will become a lot easier with the new mobile tools at our disposal. 

So will we see an army of VR zombies in trains and waiting rooms this year, like in this (already legendary) Mark Zuckerberg photo? It’s hard to say — there will definitely be a lot more eyes immersed in virtual reality this year, and, as people get used to it, they’ll be more willing to use VR headsets with their phones. I’d be surprised to see mobile VR become hugely popular overnight. But the content, the devices and the experience will be getting a lot better, fast. So when you see a guy or a girl wearing a VR headset out in the public, don’t mock or take pity on them as hopeless geeks. Think about what you might be missing. 

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