Samsung has moved to dispel fears that its Gear VR headset causes the Galaxy Note 4 handset to run too hot for extended use.
Following the announcement of the Gear VR Innovator Edition on Wednesday, certain game developers claimed the Note 4 units needed to be switched out every 20 minutes to protect against overheating.
However, the manufacturer says the concerned devs were using an older versions of the mobile SDK which demanded a little too much of the phablet's processors, hence them reaching the thermal limit quickly.
“We turned the cores back to a more reasonable level,” Samsung Dallas director of software development Andrew Dickerson, told Recode. He added that “developers lose some performance, but we’ve made some improvements” to ensure the losses aren’t felt too much.
Samsung says the new mobile SDK allows users to run the Gear VR headset for 8 hours continuously without feeling the heat, so to speak.
Samsung’s rebuttal comes despite the company’s employees continuing to swap out demonstration units every 20 minutes at the firm’s Developer Conference,
The company's Gear VR hardware partner Oculus also admitted the problem is something that could be managed but not necessarily solved.
Max Cohen, the head of mobile at Oculus VR said: ““This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away in the near future, unfortunately,” Cohen told MIT’s Simon Parkin. “We’ll always have to manage heat; we won’t be able to fully solve it.”
The $200 Gear VR virtual reality headset will go on sale in the United States in early December, Samsung confirmed yesterday.
The firm also announced the Project Beyond 360-degree camera module which will allow Gear VR users to jump into fully immersive 3D worlds in real-time.
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