 So at the behest of Samsung, we've been down in San Francisco for the last couple of days at their 2016 Developers Conference to get our fingers on the pulse of what's hot in the industry right now. And the answer, pretty much no matter where you look, is VR. There are still a lot of challenges to overcome. Weight of the devices, dizziness, image quality, both in terms of frame rate and resolution, cost, the requirement to have a phone connected, though Samsung did hint they are working on standalone devices. But, there is a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe that is going to help continue VR's march towards mainstream acceptance. First up is the Gear 360. This is not the first time they've shown it. The actual unveiling was at Mobile World Congress about a month ago. But this was our first chance to spend some real quality hands-on time with it. The device itself is pretty simple. On each side you'll find a 180 degree wide angle f2.0 aperture lens with combined 30 megapixels of sensor resolution behind them. Though it appears that that resolution is utilized only for stills. And when it comes to video, you'll be limited to almost 4K or 3840 by 1920. The unit we checked out isn't quite finished, so the side door was taped on. But that didn't stop us from popping it off to have a look at the micro SD slot and swappable 1350 mAh battery that's good for two or so hours of recording. The camera is dust and splash resistant. There will be an IP68 rated case available later. And we're expecting, at the time of filming this, it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 US dollars, given its 350 euro price across the pond. That's cool Linus, but how does it work? Really well actually. This is an impressive little piece of kit. You pick your mode, stills, video, time lapse, or short looping video is a separate mode from video for some reason. Then with the camera paired to the phone via WiFi direct, you won't have enough bandwidth to save a file directly to the phone this way. But what you'll get is a really nice live preview of what you're shooting once you press record. Then what you do is you browse the files on the camera, convert and copy them over to your phone and you can play it back a number of different ways. You can view the raw unstitched file, you can look around using the motion sensor on your phone, or you can pop it in a Gear VR and have the full immersive experience. Considering that it's priced similarly to a high end GoPro, I can see a lot of creators having a ton of fun with a device like this. Speaking of fun, it's time to go hit the VR demos. First up is gaming. This Vulcan demo was really impressive. They got this alien assault game that's reminiscent of a VR game that I played at an arcade about 12 years ago. So weapon aiming is handled by looking rather than actually pointing the weapon. The graphics are fairly rudimentary and given it's a tech demo, it's impressive it's playable at all. But the gameplay is pretty easy with a blaster that takes out like 10 dudes at once and a secondary fire with no recharge that drops an asteroid on the entire assaulting force. Which doesn't sound impressive until you consider that this is running on a device that is literally a thousandth the size of the gigantic gaming booth that I was standing in all those years ago. And this is in no small part thanks to Vulcan. The low level API that is now supported on the Galaxy S7 is capable of volumetric effects, real time shadows, light refraction, anti-aliasing, translucency, and in a nutshell, a similar or better graphical experience than what you could expect from an Xbox 360, a last gen gaming console. I mean sure, you won't be running this real time star mass accumulation demo in a VR environment yet, but seeing the performance improvement from OpenGL ES to Vulcan gives me more hope for the rate at which this is going to improve in the future. Downstairs we found a couple of more impressive demos. What stood out about this one was the fact that aside from using cameras to track the location of the person, they tricked out these Nerf guns with lights and actually, I think they're Bluetooth wireless triggers, so you could play another sort of drone assault game firing the gun independently of where your head is pointed. Because it's wireless, the latency did make it a little bit disorienting, but man, when accessories like this come out for lower latency solutions like the HTC Vive, whoa, VR man, very cool. Which isn't to say that every game-like VR experience has to be all about the lowest possible latency. I think the most impressive demo we saw was from Globacore. They had this sort of escape room with eight $3,500 Optitrack cameras feeding into a 6-core desktop running a GTX 980, and then from there, the positional data was streamed over Wi-Fi to a Galaxy S7 in a Gear VR that is actually running the game itself, the graphical fidelity of which was the best we saw running off of a phone here at the show. The position of rigid bodies, their rotations and positions in the scene are being tracked by the cameras, and to differentiate the objects in the scene, white IR reflective markers are attached in unique patterns, so they can be manipulated and reconfigured to solve the puzzle. Their Indiana Jones-style puzzle uses a total of 10 tracked objects, including a lantern that provides more or less light to you in real time. There are some limitations here. If you put the objects too close together, things can get a bit janky, and the same goes if you obstruct the camera's view of the IR reflective markers, but overall, the immersion was the best out of the demos we saw, and they even told us they had problems with people trying to run out of the room that they were trapped in once the door lifted and had to physically restrain people to keep them from barging into a physical wall. Oops. So thanks for checking out our VR roundup here at the Samsung Developer Conference 2016. Don't miss any of our Samsung Developer Conference videos by checking out the applicable playlist, and if you're not subscribed to Linus Tech Tips, make sure you do that as well.