How Chinese companies are taking virtual reality into whole new worlds

Reading Time:3 minutes

A visitor to Taipei’s annual Computex exhibition tries a pair of HTC's Vive Virtual Reality goggles. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:00am, 14 Nov 2016Updated: 4:01pm, 14 Nov 2016

Imagine walking into your kitchen and entering the hotel room you hope to stay in next month. Or looking to your left and seeing the Mona Lisa, which you hope to visit on your trip, almost near enough to touch. Or looking down to find yourself surfing a wave in Hawaii – your other choice of holiday should your Paris plans fall through.

Such scenarios are among the loftier hopes for Virtual Reality [VR] and while the technology might not quite have caught up to the vision – or not quite yet – it’s easy to see why the hype surrounding the industry has taken off over the past five years.

Major multinationals and plucky startups alike are coming to appreciate that the potential of VR stretches far beyond the computer gaming industry and into tourism and education.

A visitor to the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, Italy, uses immersive VR goggles to watch a multimedia exhibition 'L'Ara com'era' (The Ara as it was). Photo: EPA

Tech giants such as HTC, Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi are now investing heavily in the technology, in an effort to catch up with the smaller companies such as 3Glasses that have emerged as major forces in China’s VR sector, some of which have been shipping tethered VR head-mounted displays as far back as 2014.

One area where the larger companies hope to dominate their smaller rivals is that of so-called screenless viewers, where smartphones are clipped onto headsets, such as the Samsung Gear VR, to provide a VR or Augmented Reality (AR) experience.