Dev update #20

Last week we managed to put together core components of GearVR version. We already have working internal version which benefits from fast and stable sensors. Latency is a bit better because of more frequent updates of head rotation. The whole experience is noticeably smoother and has no drift.

Because of similar concepts in both Android and GearVR versions we decided to spend some time to extract as much as we could into shared library to make further developement faster. There is still some work to be done in terms of stability and user experience but things are really looking good and we are satisfied with progress. There is no release date at present but some test version should become available this month. It's now a matter of weeks, not months.

There's a really nice thing about Gear VR native API. We can set CPU frequency to lower (reducing battery drain and heat generation). We hope that it allows to run long Gear VR sessions without overheating.

We spent a lot of time trying to fix some of the problems experienced by specific phone models (Zenfone 2, Galaxy S4, Redmi Note 2/3, Huawei Honor 4C/P8 Lite). This process takes a lot of time because those problems happen only in very specific configurations that we cannot reproduce with our hardware. There will be beta mobile update tomorrow that will include some extra fixes for Zenfones 2 running Android OS 5.0 (Zenfones 2 updated to 6.0 should work already in beta channel).

If you still experience problems after tomorrow's update (mobile app ver. 1.1.1b) use the Diagnostics mode available in settings and send us logs again. We only received several reports this month and percentage of users reporting problems went down significantly so it means that some fixes in fact worked. 

We'll try to get more phones at the office but since those problems are caused by undefined set of conditions it's not easy because the same model (Samsung S4 for example) can use different hardware for European and American variants. That's why this takes so long. We create a potential solution -> send it to testers -> receive reports -> figure out what went wrong this time. Add some delays for each of the steps above (timezone differences, work schedule, people leaving for a weekend) and it turns out that testing simple fix can take few days.

We're gonna refocus more on feature development now because fixing some of the phones (paragraph 2) only affects a very small subset of our users. There are few devices that absolutely dominate the Android market - Galaxies, LGs, OnePluses, Nexuses (or is it Nexi?) - and we want to add some new stuff for people using those phones too. At this point it's probably easier to add Android 4.x support or older GPU support than to fix the mysteries of some of the phone models listed in paragraph 2. There are quality improvements possible, latency optimization, overheating prevention, SteamVR features - a lot of things that are very important to us.

Currently we're aiming to release GearVR edition for public testing (through SideloadVR or similar solution) in the next 14 days. We don't expect to hit any major roadblocks.