Samsung has issued a statement saying it has fixed the overheating issues reportedly affecting the virtual reality Gear VR headset.
First spotted earlier this week at the company's developer conference, the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone at the heart of each Gear VR was only able to play VR games for 20 minutes before hitting a "thermal limit" and refusing to play until temperatures lowered. According to developers at the event, demo stations were using multiple phones to swap in and out of use to avoid hitting that thermal limit, but it wouldn't be quite that simple for customers once they actually bought the headset.
According to Andrew Dickerson, director of software development at Samsung Dallas, the 20-minute thermal limit was only an issue with older versions of the mobile SDK, which pushed the phone to its maximum clock speeds. Although the latest version wasn't running on the phones at the event, it will be available by the time the headset hits shops. “We turned the cores back to a more reasonable level,” Dickerson explained to Re/Code. "Developers lose some performance, but we’ve made some improvements" that will make up for the reduction in processing power.
However, simply down-clocking the processor cores may not be enough to completely fix the issue. Max Cohen, head of mobile at Oculus VR (the virtual reality pioneers that worked with Samsung on the Gear VR) said "This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away in the near future, unfortunately. We’ll always have to manage heat; we won’t be able to fully solve it.”
The Gear VR is set to go on sale in the US from December onwards, with prices starting from $200 for the headset and $250 for a bundle including a Bluetooth game controller. Unfortunately for virtual reality fans, you'll also have to factor in the cost of a Galaxy Note 4 as well.
We'll have to wait until the final version arrives to find out if the overheating problems have been stamped out or not.
