If this is the case, then I'm not sure Oculus was worth the money Facebook paid for them - Samsung seems to own all the relevant IP and it's not clear what Oculus provides that couldn't be replicated by another company in short order. If Oculus Gear takes off as a product, it seems like Chinese manufacturers would start churning out knockoffs and commoditize the product space.
The screen is only a small piece of the puzzle. Most of the value of the Oculus products comes from the insane software optimizations that have been done at all levels of the stack to bring down the latency.
Oculus owns a lot of the IP, and more importantly know-how. Evidently the Gear VR was the result of extremely tight integration between Samsung and Oculus engineering, with Oculus providing the bulk of the VR-specific knowledge. Samsung provided screens and phones.
Late in the game, the Oculus engineers pushed for major changes to the architecture to allow the phone to communicate with the sensors in the headset in a very low latency way -- something nearly bare metal. Evidently it took a lot of convincing.
(A friend heard this from Carmack in person, for what it's worth.)
If this is the case, then I'm not sure Oculus was worth the money Facebook paid for them - Samsung seems to own all the relevant IP and it's not clear what Oculus provides that couldn't be replicated by another company in short order. If Oculus Gear takes off as a product, it seems like Chinese manufacturers would start churning out knockoffs and commoditize the product space.