Google building 'high-powered' VR headset

In a bid to compete with Facebook's Oculus Rift, Microsoft's HoloLens and Apple's Virtual Reality device, internet giant Google may be preparing a consumer Virtual Reality headset for a release as early as this year.

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The Financial Times reported a few days ago that the technology giant would be releasing a mobile-based Virtual Reality (VR) in the near-future.

According to Techcrunch, Google will be building the headset utilising 'high-powered' chips from Movidius, the machine vision technology.

"The technological advances by Google are astounding. The challenge in embedding this technology into consumer devices boils down to the need for extreme power efficiency, and this is where a deep synthesis between the underlying hardware architecture and the neural compute comes in," said Movidius, CEO Remi El-Ouazzane, in a blog post last month.

Virtual reality , which can be referred to as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated reality, replicates an environment that simulates a physical presence in places in the real world or an imagined world, allowing the user to interact in that world.

Virtual realities artificially create sensory experiences, which can include sight, touch, hearing and smell.