Virtual reality is a hot topic for mobile devices. 2015 was the year of the rise of mobile VR with Samsung and Oculus releasing the Galaxy Gear VR headset for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Note 5, as well as Galaxy S6 smartphones. Around the same time, Google launched their Google Cardboard VR headsets and the trend grew with a myriad of other players releasing Head Mounted Displays (HMD) for VR. From Asia with Deepoon’s all-in-one headsets and VIRGLASS headsets with a smartphone tray, to Western companies like Carl Zeiss and their VR One HMD.
Also during 2015 Unity, the games and graphics engine most used by developers, added native support for Samsung Gear VR as well as for other VR/AR hardware using third party plug-ins.
At ARM®, in order to help our partner ecosystem to flourish in that area, we released our first VR SDK v0.1 alpha release during the summer of 2015. This March at GDC we launched our v1.0 publically to developers and our OEM and SiP partners.
The ARM Mali™ VR SDK is based on Android and OpenGL ES at this stage and includes sample code and libraries for VR developers. It’s applicable to everyone from VR application developers to HMD designers who would like to achieve the lowest latency, highest performance and minimal battery consumption on any ARM Mali based mobile platform.
To get your environment set up you need the Android Studio SDK and the Android NDK. The developer can either render the samples on any Android device or they can calibrate the sample for specific HMD they are designing. The samples cover everything from VR basics and the fundamentals of stereoscopy, to how best to use the Multiview extension and implementing Multi-Sampling.
You can download the VR SDK from our ARM Mali Developer Center, and standby for the future updates with all the new VR extensions on Android on their way!