Samsung is streaming a live broadcast of its “Unpacked” event at Mobile World Congress to Gear VR.
“Join us for our 360 degree live event,” reads the description of the newly released “Unpacked VR” Gear VR app.
The event in Barcelona is likely to reveal a series of hardware announcements from Samsung including a follow-up to the company’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S6. Samsung is also developing a 360-degree camera it calls Project Beyond and, at CES in January, it debuted a tracked hand controller project called Rink.
The “Unpacked” app arrived on the Oculus store with screenshots suggesting it will feature both “traditional live streaming” and the option to “experience the event in 360.” According to a screenshot, the event kicks off in Barcelona on Sunday, February 21 at 7 p.m. Central European Time. For those of us on the west coast of the United States, that translates to Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
It would be pretty impressive if Samsung used its own “Beyond” cameras to stream the event live. The prospect would offer Samsung a chance to showcase its technological prowess in a way very few companies could hope to match. That would, however, be quite the stretch to expect for the still-unreleased “Beyond” technology. Through this one event a single company could theoretically demonstrate the hardware to both capture and display a live VR experience to people around the world. Of course, 360-degree streaming is a very new technology and not an easy one to pull off, so, whether or not Samsung uses its own cameras or someone else’s, any problems with the stream would reflect very poorly on Samsung.
Either way, the Gear VR streaming option sounds like a great opportunity to see from a new angle what advances Samsung is planning for virtual reality in 2016.
This post was updated with additional information.
