Phone screens on top-end phones are high enough quality to manage (and are higher resolution than most PC monitors anyway). They also have the added benefit of being able to render graphics internally as opposed to being attached to a PC by a cord. Yeah, the graphics may not be quite as good, but the gap in perceived graphics quality between a $1000 PC and a flagship cell phone is rapidly closing.
I think the Rift will be the choice of the "PC Master Race", but a solution like this is much more mass-market friendly. There's no reason a headset like this should cost more than $30 once mass-produced - and that's low enough to be an impulse purchase for a lot of people.
The key overlooked point for VR - a point that Carmack had enough pull to persuade Samsung to address - is latency. http://oculusrift-blog.com/john-carmacks-message-of-latency/... The system must render "motion-to-photons" the image in less than 20ms to avoid discernible (& disorienting) lag. That's fast enough that the graphics system doesn't have time to buffer the image (which would cut available render time by a large percentage); Carmack was able to convince Samsung of the importance of "unbuffered display" in a market where otherwise nobody cares about such minute timings.
If you take a look at games like Deus Ex the Fall which was also ported to PC (with mobile assets even though they could have just taken the high res assets from Human Revolution) you'll see that it's not even close.
You may not notice it on a tiny screen but on a monitor or a HMD it's absolutely terrible. It looks like a game from 8 years ago.
The trend lines showed a year ago that a high end smartphone in about 3 years from now (mid-way through the PS4's lifetime) will have higher paper specs than a PS4 (paper specs, not necessarily as well-utilized).
An Nvidia Shield tablet is on paper roughly equivalent to an XBox360. The Shield set top box is double that. A few more doublings and the prediction will play out.
You may need a smartphone, though that's debatable, but you don't need a high-end expensive one. And those wont't have paper specs anywhere near PS4-level anytime soon.
I had the chance to use the first generation of this setup together with a variety of other VR headsets a few weeks ago at a VR film festival. It was fun and worked pretty well, but non of the screen that I got to try had the needed pixel density. I was able to see the pixels on all of them, because the screen is so close to your eyes.
If VR is going to matter for movies and tv it's only going to be on devices like this that everyone can participate on economically. Streaming game services will also close the gap between this and an expensive dedicated gaming rig per headset.
Streaming games have far too much latency for VR applications. Latency requirements for VR are much lower than console games because too much latency on head tracking can cause nausea and breaks the "immersion" effect.
But yeah, I agree that when VR blows up big, it'll be something like this rather than the PC-based Oculus. That solution has always felt clunky and more like a development kit than a consumer product.
I think the Rift will be the choice of the "PC Master Race", but a solution like this is much more mass-market friendly. There's no reason a headset like this should cost more than $30 once mass-produced - and that's low enough to be an impulse purchase for a lot of people.