Samsung wants its Exynos 9 chip inside standalone VR headsets

This article originally appeared on our sister site, VR Source.

Samsung is already a huge proponent of virtual reality, thanks to its Gear VR smartphone-based headset. However, it also wants its technology inside standalone VR devices as well. At this week’s 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show, Samsung is demoing how this might work to interested OEMs with its own Exynos 9 chip.

According to PCWorld, Samsung has used its Exynos chips mostly inside its own products, like the international versions of its Galaxy smartphones. However, it now wants more third-party hardware makers to consider using Exynos processors inside VR headsets, along with automobiles, robots, wearables, and possibly Chromebooks.

The Exynos 9 8895 chip, which was used as the VR demo at MWC, is also the same chip that’s expected to be used in the upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone. The octa-core chip includes a Mali G71 GPU, supports 4K video and even has a vision processing unit especially for VR headsets.

There’s no word yet when, or even if, any companies will sign up to use Exynos 9 chips inside their VR products. Samsung will likely have a lot of competition from rivals Qualcomm and MediaTek, both of which are pushing for their new chips to be inside VR headsets as well.

One thing is for certain; it looks like the future of mobile VR is not going to focus on smartphone-assisted headsets, but untethered standalone devices. It remains to be seen if these products will be as popular as smartphones have turned out to be.