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Google's VR/XR strategy has been very stop-and-go, between Cardboard, Daydream, and a host of their VR applications they invested into 8 years ago (Poly, Earth, TiltBrush). It's obvious they don't want to be a leader in the space - just want to hedge their bets in case it becomes a viable market. If they maintained a steady presence in the space, I think Daydream could be competitive as a lower-entry-point alternative to the Quest headsets - which - since they run Android, would be potentially mutually beneficial.
This x100, I wrote a similar message on a WebXR forum. They've started and stopped so many times it's hard to take this effort seriously. Is this just exec FOMO trying to catchup to Apple and Meta? Or do they really believe in this? I don't think it's the latter.
> Is this just exec FOMO trying to catchup to Apple and Meta?
Google doesn't work like this.
People can almost autonomously spawn up small projects.
If it looks promising they keep getting more resources until it either has explosive growth and profits or someone higher in the chain thinks there isn't a current viable path for THAT version of the project to profitablity.
Google might believe in XR and keep funding these small projects, but if none of them display evidence that that particular approach is going to be huge, then they move on.
It's not top down.
Sundar doesn't say, we need more XR. Team, go find me the most promising options, and then we'll fund it to the moon. And then a month later he gets bored and says, no, never mind, kill that. Let's chase another hype bubble. Only to then months later come back and say, team, we need more XR!
B.S. Perhaps it was true 10+ years ago but not today, not even close. Also, "XR" today would not be considered a small project. Cardboard perhaps counts as one and that was almost a research toy.
Anything on that scale Apple/Meta bets on is definitely brought up at the highest executive level and there has to be some thought going on what the response would be if any.
>Sundar doesn't say, we need more XR.
Right, that's the job of some random PM who will launch a half-baked XR project that overlaps with a nearly identical XR project down the hall, which will compete with its fellow Google project/product in the marketplace and confuse customers before getting killed within 18 months of launch. See also Google Wallet and Google Wallet (yes), Allo and Duo and GChat and Hangouts, and so on.
> See also Google Wallet and Google Wallet (yes)
... wat? Are you suggesting Google has two different services both called Google wallet?
Correct. Google’s forays into payments, including identically named but different products, is so complex that it has a Wikipedia diagram:
Oh sweet baby Jesus what the fuck.
Not one, not two, but three different things called Google wallet, and four different things called Google Pay, one of which was formerly called Google wallet and one of which went on to be called Google wallet.
How is this real?
Well this explains why every time I get payment autofill suggestions from Google it's a random one of four or five possible auth flows, and pulls from an arbitrary one of at least two separate data sources with different sets of cards saved...
I let my password manager handle it now.
To be fair to them, the diagram makes it look worse than it actually was. From the user perspective, you got your Google Wallet app replaced by a Google Pay app which got replaced by a Google Wallet app. They all work the same (the last one has an extra tab for transit cards), had the same data/information (loyalty and bank cards), and even look pretty similar.
Yeah, it was dumb having your app change names and slightly looks, but materially, little changed.
That is genuinely jaw-dropping.
Wait till you see Google Jaw and then witness Google drop it.
>> If it looks promising they keep getting more resources until it either has explosive growth and profits or someone higher in the chain thinks
This may be the case, but everything eventually gets compared to the ad business, and the projected financials, no matter how optimistic, look terrible. Then the team leading the initiative wises up and drops it, gets tasked with something else or frustrated and those people leave.
Your experience at Google is not what I experienced at Google. Something of much smaller scale than this would require VP approval to begin work on.
Disclaimer: I'm willing to believe that I just had less swing/power than you did at Google (or am not skilled at getting those things alight), but the idea that this was spun up "autonomously" (organically/grass roots) seems pretty far fetched.
tldr; Most things were delegated hierarchically from my experience.
You're not going to be a L4 in Data Processing and start a Stadia project on your own, no.
It would also be ridiculous for you to even try.
But you can spin up smaller things, and L7+ can start major projects if they want to risk their career.
And that's how most of the non-massive initiatives have worked.
Massive initiatives like Stadia, Cloud, Maps, Social, Play, and Gemini are atypical at Google considering the thousands of smaller projects that have launched, maybe tens of thousands considering internal projects.
Even most of those project decisions aren't happening at the C level.
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Which is why you would have to be insane to develop software for them. Twice in my career I have been involved in development projects for Google hardware (wear and daydream). Never again.
Yeah, their ability to burn goodwill with the people closest to them is unparalleled.
I guess they know there will always be someone else to fill the void, but certainly by the time of GearVR and later Stadia the whole games industry was wise to allowing any of FAANG near the crown jewels, which is a major factor in why software support for VR has been so unenthusiastic. This was not helped by Oculus hiring the old Scaleform execs who had just pissed off half the universe.
Why exactly was the promotion motivation bad?
They're complaining about developing software for Google platforms, not working at Google. The platform will get dropped because it no longer has the opportunity to fuel more L6 promos.
I think the obvious notable exception is Android, which is not going anywhere and which now has a fairly delightful development experience with Kotlin and Compose.
I wouldn't call it delightful, but that is as it is.
Kotlin folks have prevented Java support on purpose, only to be forced to update Java support, as Android slowly started to be frozen in time, thus Kotlin losing one of its selling points, Java compatibility, with everyone on JVM world moving beyond Java 8.
Go check any recent Android conference, and most likely there will be a few talks related to Compose performance and gotchas.
The risk/assumption is that once the lead developer/PM/etc. got their promotion l, they get for doing something "new" this is being dropped for a new project as maintenance brings less points for promotions.
Not less points, zero points.
> If they maintained a steady presence in the space
Problem is no one gets promoted for that. That would require a vision and strong leadership.
Something both Apple and Meta have but Google does not.
I think it's perhaps not quite that. If this post[0] is correct, then this is Google's intended way of doing things. They intentionally do not have strong leadership, because they don't believe that's the best way for them to operate.
Whether or not that's "right" or "wrong" (or neither) is of course up for debate. I personally think they could probably use at least some top-down initiatives here and there, but overall I think having most of their decisions be bottom-up is a nice way to work. I think their culture around that may not be quite right, though, as it seems to incentivize project-hopping and not seeing things through past the explosive "wow factor" phase.
I don't think that post is entirely true. It's overly simplistic and I don't think any of my friends or family that work at Google would agree wholeheartedly with that characterization.
You may still have a broader point that's worth considering but I don't think it negates my characterization of their issues entirely.
Watching Google talks at GDC throughout the years, convinced me that they don't have any idea how to deal with game studios, exactly the ones relevant to VR/XR.
They mostly talk about PlayStore analytics and marketing approaches, seldom about game technology or design.
I think of what a missed opportunity Stadia was because they didn't have a culture where people who are knowledgeable about game dev were listened to.
Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud and Stadia could have done the same for game streaming -- any new platform needs it's Super Mario Brothers that makes you rethink what games can be, otherwise players will ignore it.
I was also thinking about how MS Flight Simulator used all of that satellite imagery. You can’t tell me that someone couldn’t find an awesome game using their maps and street view horde which by now includes 3D models of a ton of places, but I don’t see anyone betting on Google for a critical dependency until they have a new CEO and convincing culture change.
Geoguessr is the kind of thing the old Google would have built internally and released as a "just for fun" or April Fool's thing
>You can’t tell me that someone couldn’t fine an awesome game using their maps and street view
Isn’t that just Niantic? They spun out of G and made Ingress and Pokemon Go
Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.
This with Google's background in long term investments.
And to come back to my point, many of the talks I was referring to, were in the context of Android games and Stadia, most still available online.
If you had to define one characteristic of Google, it is "they just don't listen". I think it comes from a viewpoint of social status in which "high status people talk and low status people listen" and they think they can maintain high status if they only never listen. (Wouldn't want to become a low-status company like Microsoft that listens sometimes)
I'd contrast that to Meta which has been through various waves of scathing criticism and often comes across as responsive, for instance they've listened a lot to devs about weaknesses in the Quest platform.
Steve Yegge had an interesting perspective that Google as a company is incredibly arrogant, but is staffed with humble individuals. I can't see how that persists though, without their people getting cocky, or at least ignorant and out of touch. None of these scenarios ends with a responsive company that listens to stakeholders and acts in their best interests.
Blame OKRs.
Systems of standardized evaluation inevitably get captured by the masters of self-presentation who, in our culture, are narcissists and psychopaths.
The person who is stuck at the bottom will be humble but as you go up systems like that filter for morally worse people. You might as well try summoning demons.
> Definitely, imagine coming to game studios talking them into rewriting into Linux/Vulkan, using command line and gdb, when the culture is using Windows and Visual Studio, including the devkits plugins for Sony and Nintendo consoles.
And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.
Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.
The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.
To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.
I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games.
Go search for last edition of Stadia developer conference, where something like Proton for Stadia was announced, alongside the acknowledgement it wasn't working as expected.
> I really don't remember a plethora, rather some games
Ubisoft's whole catalogue going all the way back to Black Flag, RDR2, EA's latest titles (FIFA, Star Wars), Cyberpunk, and tons of indie games (I had Premium, every month I got ~2 new indie games; by the end I had something like 50+ games).
They demoed some pretty cool tech that is really only possible via streaming and then nobody leveraged it so Stadia was just another boring game streaming service.
To be specific: Google could have deployed large games to large cloud services with a large number of GPUs attached. Such a system could support a world with a working set of 128GB or more and draw all the graphics for all the players with everything closely coupled (like very big couch multiplayer with multiple screens!)
Wargaming it though there is no such thing as a "128GB world" from the player's perspective and for a long time high-end games have used many tricks to shoehorn huge worlds into small boxes such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_San_Andreas
which was released for the PS2 with just 36MB of RAM! A "128GB world" that is cheaply developed could probably be crunched into a 8GB world that looks good enough with an expensive development process (you need much more out of your systems programmers and artists.) To make something that's truly a different experience you need a "2TB world" shoehorned into a 128GB world which would be an expensive proposition.
I don't think Google could have talked any game dev shop capable of that sort of thing into doing it, it was something Google was going to have to do itself. They could have afforded it. And they could have entirely changed people's expectations about games.
Are you saying Stadia can allow the largest theoretical online game world ever (largest mmo)?
Imagine you could use one of these
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/accelerator-optimized-...
A system with, say, 8 large GPUs could easily generate graphics for 24 or more players and support a complex world as in: something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
where you can walk through all the doors. A single SMP computer (kinda like couch multiplayer but with multiple screens attached) would run the whole thing which would put a limit on the player count, I can't see it exceeding 100 but the selling point would be the complexity of the world. If anybody could build a gaming cluster that could scale up to more players it would be Google.
Not to beat a dead horse, but looking at Microsoft or Sony, when they come up with rare or exclusive mechanisms they'll straight pay the game devs to specifically develop for it, to bridge the financial gap. Not just offer reduced store fees.
And Google was already pouring money into Stadia on the infra side, hell they could have bought a whole studio to make games tailored for Stadia.
Then they didn't.
As a bystander, Stadia looked to me as the most egregious dropping of the ball, in a field where reputation is worth so much.
They spent a really large amount of money getting studios to port, and then proceeded to be the worst partners ever, so nobody continued when the incentives went away.
They did have a games studio.
and shut it down
> Stadia was just another boring game streaming service
Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.
> Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud
What do you mean by this?
Ah TF1, TF2 (err... hmm... that's something else) had a normal campaign, and a very very good one at that.
My work with them was as the tech rep of a big games publisher.
Some credit is due to some Googlers: there are those that get it. Most people have no idea how close to outright failure the Play Store was, and to be honest one of my lasting regrets was not taking advantage of the situation to kill it. It is entirely on the action of those few Googlers that the Play Store turned into a remotely viable target for games, but once the beast was big enough the marketing analytics droids moved in and took over everything entirely. Today the Play Store is run with the same mentality you would run a casino.
It's going to be years before game studios even consider working with them again after the Stadia disaster.
True, but that doesn't really make them that different than Meta or Apple.
I'm a little sour about Google Cardboard. It was and still is the greatest accessible 3 DoF VR implementation in my opinion. What a fantastic concept.
It would be a nice use of "old" phones as well. Load up some old phones with Virtual Virtual Reality and other games.
Yeah I think it was a huge missed opportunity. The idea was great, the barrier to entry was really low, and it worked really well for stuff like street view / google earth.
I showed it to my daughter the other day and she was really impressed. There's only one remaining app that can use it afaik.
Google Daydream is dead, no longer supported by modern phones, the store no longer works and they removed all Daydream specific features from their own apps. Getting a Lenovo Mirage Solo to work is possible, but requires a lot of workarounds, side loading and software downgrades.
The older Google Cardboard on the other side got open sourced and is still somewhat alive, works on modern phones and even the Youtube app still has support for it. It is however not getting any attention from developers, since everybody that cares about VR has long moved on to Quest or given up on VR. Cardboard due to not having controller and limited to 3DOF was a dead end.
Handset hardware and ML/CV software has improved in the decade since Google Cardboard came out. 6DoF is definitely possible.
The Sketchfab viewer still supports Cardboard: https://sketchfab.com/models/45f5e56887f44075bbf283977c99541...
AFAICT there are zero for Daydream. I have an old Daydream headset. It's been useless for... 2 years now? 3?
It was extraordinary for watching movies. except the fact that the phone would be burning hot after 10 minutes.
I think that's exactly the reason why they've brand it under "Android" and not as a product for mass market. Seems more like a platform for other vendors and just a proof of concept, than a real product they might want to move forward with.
Exactly. Had you asked me yesterday if Android XR already existed, I would have assumed yes they built it like 10 years ago... Remember Google Cardboard? Google Glasses?
I look forward to their definite announcement of Pixel Glasses in the coming months, as this certainly won't be something they completely forget about by next quarter
It's not super clear from the article, but it kinda feels like Google isn't intending to do more hardware. It seems like Android XR is a platform to get other companies to take on that risk.
It feels like Google wants there to be an answer to Apple Vision Pro, still isn't completely sold on the idea, but wants someone else to build it using Android. I'm not sure what other Android-using company would want to take that on, though. This feels a little risky even for Samsung; I'm curious what their "Project Moohan" device will look like... will it be crazy expensive and high-tech like AVP, or will it be something much more lightweight? The photos out there seem to suggest something lower-end than AVP, but it's hard to tell.
According to long standing rumors, the Samsung headset is supposed to have micro-OLED screens just like the AVP, that alone is likely to push the price to a minimum of $2000 to $2500.
> I'm not sure what other Android-using company would want to take that on, though.
Meta uses Android for the Quest.
Will Meta adopt Android XR instead of maintaining their own Android fork? Possibly, possibly not. But they are definitely an Android-using company willing to take on the Apple Vision Pro seeing as they are already, you know, doing that.
Meta just announced Horizon OS (without saying what it will change) and the Quest/Horizon OS is both pretty good technically but also infuriatingly artificially limited. It really doesn’t looks like Meta is going to give up control in this platform anytime soon.
Yeah they're actually licensing horizon OS out to other parties. No way they're giving up that control. And I wouldn't either tbh. Google is going to kill this sooner rather than later anyway.
Cardboard is still here, YouTube app can play VR videos via it, Chrome for Android provides WebXR support via it, it's 3DoF only, but main usecase for phone VR is VR stereoscopic video which is 3DoF anyway. Daydream was attempt to create another proprietary ecosystem and is obsolete. Since then OpenXR has won as cross platform, cross vendor, open standard XR API, if Android gets standard OpenXR runtime with good 6DoF tracking and shell support everyone will be happy.
That's basically Google's strategy on everything.
>> Google's VR/XR strategy has been very stop-and-go […]
> That's basically Google's strategy on everything.
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I'd hope for Meta to support these new Jetpack APIs for the Quest / horizonOS, as their SDK is currently basically limited to Unity / Unreal / Native, with no primitives for building regular apps.
Two competing XR platforms build on Android may not be too bad if apps just run on both.
There are some warts on horizonOS for true XR experiences like the guardian system effectively locking you into a predefined/scanned room or the camera feeds not being accessible (would be useful for scanning QR codes or copying IRL text), hopefully some competitive pressure can move Meta here.
Right now there are quite a few Quest 2 & 3 devices on the market and not a single new Samsung XR glass. Any developer building a new XR app would want their app to run on Quest
Meta actually has a native SDK for apps that appears very similar to what Google announced today with Android XR.
I'd bet on Meta because XR is Zuckerberg's Moby Dick whereas it is 20% of a 20% priority at GOOG. Meta is watching competitors (Vision Pro) but also keeping an eye on cost conscious consumers. It's so refreshing to see "Big Tech" taking such a pragmatic approach.
I don't think I would call Zuckerberg's approach pragmatic so much as costly and anti-competitive.
If any Android interoperability happens, I doubt it will be because Google is encouraging or allowing it.
They’ve refused to officially support Play Store apps on Meta HW, intentionally released the most barebones versions of their products on Meta platforms, etc.
They don’t seem willing to play nice and now that they have their own platform to push, I can’t imagine that would change for the better. But would love to see it.
I can understand the camera feeds not being accessible to every app. Tbh that makes total sense. Do you trust every app developer to look around in your home? I would trust random app builders even less that I do meta :) I don't even care that much personally but I'm sure many people will.
The guardian system doesn't apply when you are in passthrough mode. You can walk around and leave screens in different rooms, you will see them through walls even :) So that's not a problem anymore. Meta has improved passthrough mode a lot since the Vision Pro came out.
The problem is that camera feeds are not accessible to any app, even with user permission. Quests have no vision capabilities because of this.
> That makes total sense. Do you trust every app developer to look around in your home?
Strawman; n.b. iOS solved that in 2009.
iOS isn't constantly recording. When it is you notice. It also doesn't have the battery life to do so.
On a VR headset multiple cameras are constantly recording.
Interesting, thanks --
Let's say iOS was recording in one app.
Can other arbitrary apps record without user intervention?
If not, how does a user enable an iOS app to use the camera?
Could that same solution be applied to vision Pro?
> I'd hope for Meta to support these new Jetpack APIs
They did deprecate their original proprietary VR APIs in favor of the cross-vendor OpenXR standard, so maybe there's hope for them playing ball.
That's going to be complicated for no particularly good reason. It will turn out kind of like Android in Kindle Fire devices: No Play Store, but some app compatibility. Google won't drop their compatibility requirements, and Meta won't give up their own development path for an AOSP based product.
Is it going to be open like Android or closed like Google Play? They seem to be evasive about licensing
I also don't quite get why AI needs to be on the OS level (AI seems to make more sense on an app level) and what connection it has to XR. They're also very vague about what tangible OS integration they're planning. Sounds like a buzzword soup. They just forgot decentralized crytocurrencies
I suspect we agree, but to try to steelman here there is a signficant and increasing need for hardware to support on-device AI, and anytime you're talking hardware there has to be a baseline level of support in the OS.
My guess though is that they are doing it because it's easier to just move AI stuff to the OS than have to do the hard work of modularizing and isolating, defining APIs and such. Also worth remembering that many of the Android decision makers don't seem to actually like Android and want to make it more like their iPhones. Android seems determined to erase (or bury to the point of impracticality) all the things that I originally loved about it. It's getting more and more closed and "the user is a security threat" with every release. I would guess that somebody is loving the amount of power and control that they can gain by doing it this way, and as long as the people continue to reward behavior like that we're going to get more of it. The iPhone being a textbook example.
I'd bet a lot of money it's not running anything significant on device AI-wise, maybe a speech model, but not anything in the key assistant pipeline that wasn't there in 2020.
It just feels a closed collaboration between Samsung and Google at this time. And there is too much unknown.
Meta apparently isn't onboard, and they don't need to. Meta knows they can't rely on Google or trust Google, so they built their own Android based platform.
There really are just a few big players in the VR world, most of which build their own platform. Meta focuses on the lower end, Apple and a few others focuses on the higher end (I am still not sure that's a real market where there is money), and Sony has just about abandoned their platform. That's it.
There are other Android XR headset manufacturers: https://www.uploadvr.com/sony-lynx-xreal-android-xr-devices/
Right, most probably closed-source just like Android wear. Even manufacturers may not have access to the source code, they would just put their stuff in the vendor partition.
A good friend of mine works for a manufacturer that make watches running on Android Wear, and closed-source system updates pushed by Google turn OS-level regressions (like battery consumption issues) into nightmares. So they are switching back to their own AOSP-based OS.
I thought Meta was doing a collab with LG on a high end headset
It has essentially nothing to do with AI, they seem to have thrown that in for bonus PR points. Sure, ML is plenty involved behind the scenes for both actual use cases (AR and VR) but it's not relevant and not what people think of when they read AI.
Reading the dev blog or the actual documentation was more informative to me:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/12/introducin...
Alternatively, maybe Alphabet actually came to understand that while it would have been a pointless waste of time to flush money away on AR and VR in the manner of Apple and Meta, AI use cases and work on stuff like like Gemini streaming and Project Astra (both prominently highlighted yesterday) convinced them that AR might actually have some general use in the future.
So they decided to put some more effort and attention behind this rather than, say, shutting it down to invest more in AI, or simply keeping it on a back burner as tech portfolio hedge.
Sometimes corporate communications actually contain a bit of meaning, as shocking as that might seem.
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Endeavors like this have failed before, but at some point (soon would be my guess) the utility of having an AI assistant with vision capability will just be too useful to resist putting an always available camera in glasses.
I'm not sure I trust Google enough to walk around my home wearing their cameras. The last thing I want to see are ads based on the contents of my home or specific details of my family.
The police might like it though. They could find out from Google the layout of a home or see if they know of any guns in a home before they SWAT it.
I thought I would bother me with meta, but it doesn't really. I leave my sex toys out and I really just don't care if it sees them :P
I think personal conversations are much more revealing than the space of my home. But as I live alone I would never speak to anyone while I use the quest.
But (odds are) you trust them enough to walk around your home wearing their microphone. Letting them listen in on all your conversations and show you ads based on those, if the conspiracy theories are true. (Unless if you're an iPhone user, then you trust Apple - and make no mistake, they're building the exact same product, they just pathologically avoid talking about prototypes)
It's boiling the frog. Unthinkable, until everybody is doing it and it's normal.
The number of people buying Apple devices for privacy suggests that quite a few people do not trust them, and while the rumors have flown around for years they’ve never been confirmed. That’s a contrast with, say, smart TV content recognition so it seems unlikely that Android phones are secretly monitoring what you say without anyone noticing the data being transmitted or the battery drain.
> so it seems unlikely that Android phones are secretly monitoring what you say without anyone noticing the data being transmitted or the battery drain.
Ah! So that’s why Androids always have bigger batteries than iPhones. ;)
I get the joke but it actually works the other way: since Android devices had a 2-5 year lag behind Apple for CPU performance it would be harder to hide some hypothetical always-on analysis, especially on the cheaper and slower devices where most of the global growth had been.
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The conspiracy theories of phones listening is not true.
TVs absolutely do that however, and it’s the first thing to disable in settings for a smart tv. I even block the TV from internet since I use an Apple TV for the streaming.
I used to agree with you, but unfortunately the conspiracy is true (or at least was at one point):
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2450052/do-smartphones-liste...
The source of that article is very clear that the device types are not known:
https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
Given that this a slide deck for a cable company’s advertising arm, it would be entirely plausible that this data comes from the hardware they give customers which is completely customized for their needs. If they were using phone apps, for example, we’d see people asking why the Cox cable app is using their iPhone’s microphone.
I asked someone who had done high level work at TikTok what he thought of the CCP conspiracy theories driving the Trump/Biden ban pushes. He said something to the effect of "ByteDance isn't coordinated enough to pull off being that evil."
Google has been incomprehensibly big for decades at this point. They know regulators are watching. Mistakes like the SSID logging controversy in Germany get interpreted as malice, and company-wide trainings go out drilling into people not to log more than they have a contemporaneous business reason for.
If there's anyone I trust to be honest and upfront about what data they're collecting and how it might be used, it's Google. They have the experience, motivation, and resources to do it right.
Companies with a lower pedigree - either from countries that don't take individual rights seriously, or from small teams that don't have the resources to cover all their bases - are the ones that give me pause.
What does your contact at ByteDance think the CCP staff does in the ByteDance offices all day? Why does the CCP need a board seat?
These companies are coordinated enough to keep out mentions of Tiananmen Square or Xi as Poo from Chinese users. If they can drop politically sensitive content in particular regions, they can boost political content in other regions, right? Whether or not they actually try to put their thumb on the scale today doesn’t really matter. That’s the nature of a security risk.
The Conversation had a pretty good article earlier this year on how (in some ways) there's no real separation between the government and companies in China.
https://theconversation.com/is-tiktoks-parent-company-an-age...
I genuinely don't think this will ever be useful. UIs based on voice and gesture are not precise enough Even if they capture words accurately, it's just not as expressive or precise as tap or click. Most people don't want to talk to their devices out loud in public. There's precious few use cases where I want data to be in front of what I'm trying to look at. We've been trying for so very long and nothing has stuck. The last coup in AR was Pokemon Go. We've had a Meta Quest for years and it's primary use is still Beat Saber. It just isn't going to happen.
> We've had a Meta Quest for years and it's primary use is still Beat Saber. It just isn't going to happen.
Try Metro Awakening. It's a really "full game" story-driven experience, I'm surprised they managed to get so much out of a mobile processor. Even on my old Quest 2 it runs impressively well.
I personally don't like the arcade style gameplay (eg beat saber) at all so I mostly play PCVR but it's really nice to see some real full games are making it to the platform now.
Eye tracking adds that precision.
I kinda doubt that. I think Apple is on the wrong track there. Maybe for now it makes sense but I don't think it will stay as the tech improves. It's pretty annoying having to look at everything you interact with. It's unnatural. Also, typing by looking at each individual key will be exhausting and slow.
Gesture tracking on the quest is very hit and miss but this is just due to the tech not being up to snuff yet. I think eventually you will just be able to type on a virtual keyboard. You can even do it now, it's just that the forward/backward tracking is pretty inaccurate still (it's pretty much the worst usecase because your fingers are not well visible to the headset cameras and moving forward/backwards which is also the most difficult to interpret. But I think this will get solved.
And the verge blog post about it.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319528/google-android-...
Seems like a very similar direction to visionOS. I’m glad Apple normalized the ability to run mobile apps spatially.
I do wonder how this affects Meta’s plans for horizonOS. Are access to Meta’s game library more important than access to androids ecosystem.
> Seems like a very similar direction to visionOS.
A crucial difference is that Android XR apparently has first-class support for 6DoF controllers (like Horizon OS) in addition to eye and hand tracking (like Vision OS) so it's aiming to compete on both fronts. Google thankfully didn't cargo-cult Apples decision to rely on eye and hand tracking, which is far from ideal for VR games.
I think Apple picked the right direction to launch with as their primary interaction method.
Controllers would be nice but as a secondary input.
Google are apparently not mandating eye tracking or hand tracking. Which is nice for flexibility but you’re going to have a mishmash of interaction models for native apps.
There is a recent rumor that they have been working with Sony to bring the PSVR 2 controllers to work on visionOS.
Given Apple has not focused on gaming I think the decision they made was a good one too. You shouldn’t NEED special controllers to use the device like early VR headsets.
However there are definitely things that would work better with controllers. Not just gaming but things where you need very fine input or having multiple buttons to switch modes or something would be good.
So I hope the rumor turns out to be true.
How did you come to that conclusion? Vision Pro sales seem to be quite poor and there's very little developer buy-in. The biggest use case for VR today is gaming, and Apple essentially decided to opt out of that market with their flagship VR product.
Fwiw HorizonOS does support hand tracking (at least in the Quest 3 which I have) and you can navigate the UI without controllers. It works quite well.
The Quest Pro also supports eye tracking, though not sure how well-integrated that is into the experience. I believe it's used to achieve foveated rendering with steam link, though.
> (at least in the Quest 3 which I have)
Yup and the Quest 2 and even the Quest 1 got it too! Though the Quest 1 is a bit behind the latest improvements though since it no longer receives OS updates.
I have some of all 3 models :)
Rumors are that Apple are caving on there "no controllers" thing https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/08/sony-vr2-controllers-ap...
I think requiring the gestures as the baseline control scheme is smart though since for something like a VR headset, having the controllers around and keeping them charged as well adds a lot of friction to using it. They should be an option though since basically any game requires it.
But Apple’s approach is fantastic for everything else.
As it allows you to use the device without having to move your arms around.
Its amazing how much undeserved credit Apple gets...
The article just shows web pages, something that has been in XR headsets for long before VisionOS and in much greater numbers in the Quest to boot.
So what has been normalized? Who is buzzing about VisionOS apps?
In this case I think they are missing a lot of deserved credit. A ton of UI paradigms, established by visionOS, are taken wholesale in XR. Even down to the styling of the developer docs
Good thread outlining the comparison
Broken link?
Perhaps you could actually read my sentence and say that it allows running Android apps natively as a first class citizen. Which is also part of the linked press release.
That they showed it with just Chrome is a presentation issue on their part, but it’s definitely a value add when you’re not constrained to the limited subset of the apps for a fledgling platform.
The meta headsets actually do run Android apps. The main issue is every major app uses Google Play Services.
It's true that Google and Apple are in a unique position to leverage their walled gardens. I'm not sure that needs normalizing.
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I can't get over how much that Samsung headset is just "sure yeah copy my homework, just change a couple of things" version of Vision Pro.
To be fair, a lot of the Vision Pro is a copy of all the AR/VR things that came before it. Even the eye tracking and gesture tracking is/was not new by any extent when Apple implemented it. That's kind of how these things work (whether it should or not is a different discussion). There's very little actual innovation because innovation is risky, and the bigger the company the less real appetite there is for risk because that's how executives get fired. The direction flows down from there. Most engineers at these companies who have good ideas and really want to innovate have to (and often want to) leave and do their own startup. These big companies are quite happy to let the startups do the innovating and take all the risk, and then just buying them out or ripping them off once there's a demonstration that there's a market. With increased regulatory scrutiny, the latter seems to be getting more common, but that's also a different discussion.
Also relevant, queue the spiderman pointing at spiderman meme.
I specifically meant the design of the headset.
The renders of the Samsung device in the Verge article look _very_ close to Vision Pro, and unlike most of other AR/VR/XR/whateverR headsets on the market.
And headsets aren't super saturated and mature market like phones, where you can make the argument like "oh there's just so many ways to make a rectangular slab of glass". No other headsets look like that!
So the crappy face in the front, the pods for the sound, the dedicated chip for all the AR functions, and the separation of battery and headset are copies of everybody else?
I do agree that the biggest innovation comes from the software, but come on.
> So the crappy face in the front, the pods for the sound, the dedicated chip for all the AR functions, and the separation of battery and headset are copies of everybody else?
Do you really consider those things innovations? I mean, the whole transparent eye thing is new for a production product like AVP, but still a pretty old idea. Maybe it originally came from Apple, I don't know. But dedicated chip for AR is definitely NOT a new idea nor innovative, nor is separation of battery and headset. It's definitely a lot more polished with those things than anything that's been built before, but polish != innovation
It’s very convenient that anything newly brought to market is not an innovation because it was presented as a concept somehwere but anything that isn’t new is simply a copy.
There’s no room in that kind of discussion space to talk about the actual details of implementation or anything with nuance that differentiates products.
> Project Moohan felt like a mix between a Meta Quest 3 and Vision Pro headset.
> In the Moohan headset, I can say, “Take me to JYP Entertainment in Seoul,” and it will automatically open Google Maps and show me that building. If my windows get cluttered, I can ask it to reorganize them. I don’t have to lift a finger. While wearing the prototype glasses, I watch and listen as Gemini summarizes a long, rambling text message to the main point: can you buy lemon, ginger, and olive oil from the store? I was able to naturally switch from speaking in English to asking in Japanese what the weather is in New York — and get the answer in spoken and written Japanese.
[dead]
That Verge article has at least a rendering of some VR/AR/XR headset, original post doesn't show or talk about any hardware.
My initial thoughts:
- Some cool ideas at the OS/UXD level. Genuinely impressed the thinking behind them seems more thoughtful and innovative than what Apple did with VisionOS. (Not surprising given that Apple doesn’t understand or believe in XR from the top down.)
- Not looking forward to continued knee-capping of their products/services on other XR platforms but c’est la vie.
- I have zero faith they’ll actually invest resources in this long-term, given how they treated their previous XR efforts. As an XR dev, I doubt I will bother to build anything for their platform until I see a serious long-term investment in the space, and decent momentum / market share.
It would super cool if they eventually make this a part of the phone OS and all you would need to do is buy a headset and plug it in over USB-C. Same idea as Dex, different display form factor, but same computer.
Then with Android Auto, Dex, and XR, you would just need a single computer you can carry with you.
Seems like the end state for personal computing. Instead of buying separate computers, you buy human interface devices and plug them in over USB-C.
I had a very weird day and I thought about this.
Cloud sessions for everything, one unified OS for your phone, VR, PC, TV, etc.
Built from the ground up, it both runs on a 30$ phone and a 6k computer. Do it on Risc V or another open source architecture.
Then I came back to earth and realized this would cost hundreds of billions to build and market.
Android is close. But ultimately you can't run any PC apps on it( although Dex + Remote Desktop to a Microsoft Cloud PC can fake it).
In my dream we don't even need USB C, your just limited to whatever device your currently using. For example you're TV could probably play the Sims, or use cloud gaming. Your PC could also play the Sims, but AAA games as well.
We'd have to build a new OS( probably a Linux distro) which is heavily dependent on cloud services.
I'd be hyper aggressive with the marketing. A 50$ mini Risc V PC gets you started.
>But ultimately you can't run any PC apps on it
> Android is close. But ultimately you can't run any PC apps on it
Android can run KVM. What Android cannot do is run Windows due to the consumer would not have or bring a license or purchase a license.
It's almost like Microsoft had an Android phone recently.
For some strange reason they never saw fit to put Windows arm on it.
What about wireless? Wireless earbuds popular. People might find it a UX downgrade to need a cable running from their glasses to their phone in their pocket as they walk down the street (the demo shows AR navigation as someone walks down the street).
WiFi 6 does ok for VR. The current limitations IMHO are the hardware on glasses / headsets in terms of compute and power. Not too dissimilar to how wireless earbuds just weren’t practical til what 5 years ago?
Looks like a chance to finally have modern standalone HMD with unlocked bootloader. Meta and ByteDance ones are locked down and full of spyware
Are you suggesting that a company where ads are a major revenue source going to release a product that doesn't spy on you?
No, but their product might have an option to opt-out via some hard hoops.
I really wish Glass-style HMDs had taken off... I've built my own, but it's useless if the sun is out at all. I just want something unobtrusive and inexpensive that I can drive with a real computer.
I have a glass enterprise edition and it's ok with the sun out. But unobtrusive it is not. I'd rather have something like the Vuzix Blade.
The device is completely abandoned by google by the way, but at least it can run normal Android apps so it can still be useful.
Vuzix Blade would be fine too, just something that has a display you can look at when you want to and ignore when you don't. The Blade is way too damn expensive, though.
Yes it is :(
I got the glass second-hand super cheap but that was way too expensive new as well.
They should create their own glasses with this new Android and name it:
Google Glass
Some of the mockups here look eerily like those from Google Glass. Somehow I doubt walking around with head mounted cameras beaming everything to the cloud is suddenly going to become OK, though there is definitely a generational shift on that.
Yeah and that wasn't even the real reason glass failed. The tech just wasn't mature.
The Google vaporware of 2025 to be discontinued in 2026...
Last thing I want is Google, Qualcomm and Samsung looking over my shoulder all day.
Last thing? So you prefer Horizon OS (Meta) or visionOS (Apple) instead?
The market already answered for the time being: none of them. This is space is an R&D sinkhole, all what companies do is make land grabs for an imagined future.
It would be a great thing if some unknown company cracks all of this before any of the big ones do.
Seemingly feels unlikely, due to the cost perhaps, but it would upend things a bit, put these bigger companies on their toes.
I'm not sure why you could infer that from my answer. Last thing is a figure of speech not an ordered set with my point being the tail item :)
They inferred it because those companies were left out of your category of the "last thing you'd want". Anything left out would be categorized as "not the last thing you'd want" when there are parallels in the omitted yet well known offerings.
That would assume that it was possible to rank them, which I made no statement about.
Anyway this discussion is starting to sound like Slashdot circa 1999...
You don't have to make a statement about ranking them when you said "the last thing you'd want". Figure of speech or not. It seems telling to the reader when discussing XR to leave them out, that's all. You could have just clarified and called it a day.
The fact that we're being so pedantic now instead of discussing our actual opinion is making me more certain that your purpose was not to have a discussion so I'll shutup now.
My initial point was a really that there are terrible privacy implications and poor track record of actually treating the customer well, as if that wasn't obvious.
As for the rest, I'm just pissed off with people throwing their words into my mouth. Oh there we go again.
Fair enough, let me know when you want to provide more opinions you don't want to discuss :)
I think they are implying that eventually you'll be forced to choose from those three options, and it will be kind of mandatory.
The vast majority of people in the world don't own any VR device as of today, and likely never will. I don't see there is a "be forced to" thing happening.
I can't see that happening at all. The idea gives little utility over the top of the last big leap (smart phones) with a lot of additional costs and problems.
I'm so excited about this, but the fact that Google's behind it has me worried. Android XR will be ditched 1-2 years after release
Seems unlikely, only Meta and Apple have a comparable OS. Other manufacturers would have to either build their own thing or use Android XR.
Who are the "other manufacturers"?
I don't see many companies interested in this area. Sony has almost given up, Pico has had some major setbacks, and you know what happened to Apple's Vision Pro. There will continue to be investment, but likely by the same big players. There just isn't a lot of money out there, and not many companies can afford this.
Honestly, if Zuckerberg is no longer Meta's boss, they may have already shut down Quest entirely.
I was assuming that VR headsets or AR glasses would become mainstream at some point, like smartphones or tablets, with various Chinese manufacturers competing for the best price. But maybe you are right and that's too optimistic.
They've been around for awhile now and it's still not mainstream. What's holding people back now? Quest is pretty affordable. The quality is pretty good. You think a sleeker form factor will finally tip the scales?
Maybe not VR then. But perhaps AR glasses like Meta's Orion prototype. Though that seems somewhat doubtful as well.
Meta licenses their OS to other hardware players just like Google does. Apparently Microsoft, Asus and Lenovo are participating.
I believe Immersed is using Qualcomm Spaces for the Visor, but maybe that is lower level and Android XR builds on that as well?
Looks like it is close to this and Qualcomm has tools to simplify the migration to Android XR
Hopefully Google won't follow Meta by forcing developers to create an account just to develop apps for the device. On Quest 2 you can just enable developer mode and use adb, but on Quest 3 you have to create an account and have a companion phone just to enable developer mode.
On Quest 2 it's the exact same process, you have to create a developer account (sometimes verify a credit card or phone number) and have a companion phone to enable developer mode. In fact you need to have a companion phone to use either headset at all. I had problems pairing my Quest 2 headset with my phone initially and the headset was just a useless brick until it's set up with an account through a phone app and a brittle pairing process.
For the Quest 1 too. It's always been this way.
Weird. Maybe I've always been given a Quest that was already setup or rooted. I've never bought one myself. I only ran into this issue recently with a Quest 3. Every Quest 1 and 2 I've used I could enable developer mode and do what I wanted. adb just worked after enabling developer mode.
Yeah the developer mode toggle only shows up if you have the developer flag on your account. Maybe you had it switched on at some point? You also need this to run sidequest for example.
I've always had it too because I already had a developer account with them since the first Rift devkit.
Like a Google account? I’ve always been curious if that actually had ever been a showstopper for anyone other than very niche tech circles.
I would love to see _anyone_ release a minimal MR headset with the form factor/weight around that of the big screen beyond, a resolution equivalent to looking at a 1440p monitor and no onboard mobile hardware/battery.
WIRED data & video via USB-C. No compression. Latency equivalent to a desktop monitor with DisplayPort/HDMI, good colours and a high refresh rate.
If I want standalone VR; I would like to be able to plug my headset into my phone via USB-C and Android XR pops up. After all, what's the point of putting a phone in my headset when I already have a flagship phone with the same specs?
If I want to do productivity work; I would like to be able to plug my headset into my laptop/desktop and the OS displays a minimal/familiar virtual space to do stuff in (unlike WMR home) that lets me arrange several virtual monitors around me - or better yet, no monitors, just floating windows themselves.
Having tried to use the Q3 for productivity, I can see that we actually have the technology for this but headset vendors cram hardware we don't need into these devices making them impractical for anything other than 45 minutes of VR gaming.
Give me a headset I can wear for 8+ hours a day that replaces my multi-monitor workstation and I can pack in my laptop bag.
I love the navigation video example. It's so much better than staring down at a cell phone. At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to style (looking at you, Apple Vision Pro).
I'd wish for arrows and directive lines overlayed straight at eye level at the actual turning points. Basically video game style.
In the video it's still limited to messages and map pictures in their dedicated box and makes me think the platform still won't be good enough to handle more complex overlaying.
It's so much better than staring down at a cell phone.
When the iPhone's App Store came out, there were a bunch of apps that were all about overlaying information on real-time real-world imaging. One of them was navigation where you'd hold your phone up (horizontally) and it would overlay the real world with lines and arrows. I wonder why that never really caught on.
There was another great one that was an SMS app that overlayed your conversations on the camera feed, so you could walk and text at the same time without falling into a mine shaft, or stepping in dog poo, or whatever. With today's technology, that could be just a toggle. Again, for some reason people didn't like it.
For navigation to work in VR, location services have to accurately know where you are and which way you're facing, which they don't. Compasses don't work in most urban situations because there's too much magnetic metal around you. Visual localization does work but the map has to be up to date.
We're talking about an effort from the company whose AR lead quit and then excoriated them publicly for being unfocused, right: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-head-of-ar-s...? Like, just a year ago?
From that article:
A report from Insider claimed that Google had shifted its focus to "creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets." For example, it has been working on an Android-based XR platform for use in a product that Samsung plans to produce. Google said during its I/O conference in May that it will announce more details about this partnership with Samsung sometime before 2024.
The part about "before 2024" may have been overly optimistic, but other than that, they seem to be sticking to the plan.
Okay, but... Who's gonna buy this, and when? *R seems to have been cooling for quite some time, AI is cooling among reports of negative workplace productivity gains and poor private customer acceptance...
And, timing wise, this being just announced... is it gonna ship straight into a market collapse?
> reports of negative workplace productivity gains
Is this anecdotal or is there a source? I’d be interested to learn more.
Off the cuff, I remember https://www.forbes.com/sites/torconstantino/2024/09/12/77-of...
I thought there was also a report from one of the big consultancy firms but I need to search for that.
Cool. In the meantime Google Assistant still fails to reliably call my contacts via voice command. And trying to use Google's AI offering as a paying customer of Google apps for work is a giant shitshow. So much so that I'm finally contemplating of dropping the Google ecosystem all together.
With the iPhone XR being an existing namesake and "Android" being first understood to many as a type of phone, I don't think this was a good naming convention idea for a completely different category of product.
XR is common as a name for the space.
OpenXR, WebXR. Even visionOS is actually xrOS if you look at the SDK.
From a developer perspective, that's true. I don't think the average consumer shares the same perspective.
True but does the average customer care that it’s running Android either?
https://i.imgur.com/3HqLMma.png
I guess we'll see.
I don't think most consumers are familiar with the iPhone XR. They know iPhone, and maybe iPhone X, but I don't think the naming will be an issue here.
I guess we shall see.
Don't worry, it will be abandoned and recreated multiple times in the next 10 years anyway.
It'll be sunsetted before then.
My first impression was that they're bringing back something similar to Cardboard/Daydream. Agree that the naming is confusing on several levels, whether you're familiar with XR as nomenclature for VR/AR or not.
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> With the iPhone XR
Enough time has passed that this doesn't feel like a real concern.
Is there a real market and revenue to be made with these mixed reality headsets like Quest and AVP? If so what does mass market adoption even mean for these? I suspect the peak is not far from where we are now. Thoughts?
AR is still very much a gimmick as we are surrounded by screens right now and we don’t need anything on our face to see them. They’re also easier on the eyes as headsets like AVP have a fixed focal plane.
VR on the other hand like the Quest, lots of people use everyday for games, exercise, media and socialization.
Unfortunately big tech thinks VR is for children, and keeps plowing money into AR because that’s what adults want. Meta’s best demos for AR was annotating prices on pieces of fruit.
Apple, Meta and now Google are like lemmings jumping one after the other off the AR cliff.
At least Meta made a decent headset. They could probably make some money off of if if the software was better and the store better curated, but they are way over extended on hardware people in AR lala land as their VR software just crawls along.
A week ago I went into the XR glasses rabbit hole and it seems there is much happening.
XReal released a 6DoF model with 2x1080@120Hz that weights under 100g.
That's something you can wear in the wild without looking crazy.
With Samsung DeX and a Bluetooth keyboard, it's probably enough to do everyday work.
Get the size and power consumption down a bit more and I could see these glasses replacing laptops for most people.
Google as a first class partner is a massive liability. Example: Stadia was amazing and they snuffed it in the cradle.
Samsung should license Google App store, but retain full control for executing a product launch.
> Example: Stadia was amazing and they snuffed it in the cradle.
You can be amazing and not make money.
Google is in the business of building good products AND making money.
Stadia was a good product.
It didn't look like it would ever make money.
I wonder how society is going to adapt to everyone literally having a camera pointed at them all the time by the people they interact with. You can say 'there are cameras everywhere' or 'cameras are on phones', but it is different when the camera is on someone's face that you are talking to. Imagine every social interaction being on video, or at least not knowing if it is. We will have to adapt to that, probably by being overly cautious about what we say and do.
I wonder how society is going to adapt to everyone literally having a camera pointed at them all the time by the people they interact with.
I wonder if VR cameras can be blinded by IR emitters like we used to do to digital video cameras in movie theaters. My IR LED-studded headband won't look any stranger than someone walking around in public with a VisionPro strapped to their head.
Many VR systems rely on IR light for controller tracking, but if the camera is doing hand tracking, it might filter it out.
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Nice, I'm excited for more development and adoption in this area, as I enjoy gaming on VR!
I've recently got a Quest 3 (previously had a Valve Index) and I'm frankly blown away by the progress over the last 5 years, and also how well streaming games over wifi works - and generally, cable-less PCVR - I wasn't aware it's gotten so good by now!
Though I think there's still a long way to go, ergonomics-wise, until I'm happy to wear goggles all day long to work in them.
Pro tip: did you know that there are certain words and phrases that make people's glaze over? Many authors of press releases don't. "XR" is one and "Gemini" is another. Use more than one in the same headline and your audience concludes the message is "move along folks nothing more to see here"
(at least they avoided 5g and blockchain... for now)
Was Android XR announced before this? I remember seeing a job ad for Android XR on Google's job board.
Can't wait for Google to abandon this in 6 months and shut it down in two years!
Let's all get invested... not.
I am guilty of not seeing the point of the internet when it first came about, so I fully expect I'm wrong again. But I don't get these wearables beyond games, and potentially in the context of museums. I certainly don't think I'll be using these things.
So, for the VR stuff it's unclear, though I think everyone is underrating just how good the social aspect is - being able to have a "face to face" conversation with your friend who lives across the country is incredible (it's nothing like a video call, the 3rd dimension really tricks your brain)
However, sticking to the XR stuff, it helps if you think of it not as a new class of device (though it is) but as a new class of screen.
Think of it as the monitor version of what smartwatches are for cell phones. Sure, smartwatches don't let you do anything new, but they're extremely popular because they let you interact with your personal all-device without taking it out of your pocket- at the cost of being on a tiny screen. XR devices expand on that, making the whole world your screen, letting you spawn as many 4k monitors as you want or tiny displays wherever.
They have a few added features, like overlays on things you see, but just like the health stuff on smart watches, that's an added feature that can grow the market and help a person justify it, not the core of the product.
Yeah! I'm very interested in using one of these as a computer monitor replacement.
I use my Quest almost daily for exercise. It's a game changer in that regard. Especially, in MR, which is more aligned with the XR in this post.
> I use my Quest almost daily for exercise. It's a game changer in that regard.
I exercise almost daily without a VR/AR headset. How would that technology improve my workouts? My impression is that it's a gimmick that is not worth the costs (discomfort, increased risk of injury, sweat, privacy issues).
Gamification, fun, and variety.
Exercise can get really monotonous for some people.
But if you practice in a boxing app that also makes it a game of skill, which you enjoy more, why wouldn't you?
Also, I'd guess you're much more likely to injure yourself with heavy weights in the gym, then during the more aerobic/cardio type of exercise you do in VR.
Super boring without a screen, and/or headphones, for me.
Need my dopamine!!! Then endorphins, go go go!
Never even considered that. How does it work? I don't exercise with earphones or a phone because I don't like things on my head/ears while exercising. I don't like wearing jewelry, even watches. I'm aware this is fairly unique.
There's a game called beat saber where you have to swing light swords at blocks that fly towards/past you in sync with music. It will get you sweating pretty fast while having fun and not noticing how hard you're exerting yourself.
I'm interested in using it for exercise, what apps do you use?
SynthRiders. Like Beatsaber but better IMO. Hard to put down once I start. I always leave sweaty. It has a decent community and decent custom tracks.
Sorry Google.
You lost this one to Facebook, like you did messaging.
You're going to kill it in a few months anyway.
I see that they have added many of the visionos window / volumetric design language which is good if you want to target both devices especially if you have a Unity project.
I actually expected visionos 2 to have at least some of the AI features that AndroidXR has or even what was launched with Apple Intelligence. But, looking at both releases of XR applications it is a huge buy in with developers. I've been trying to learn visionos and it is difficult. If I want to develop with Android XR you always have to worry about the possibility that they will stop supporting the project if the current devices don't do as well and also Google tried to do XR already.
I really do like that there is competition in the space. What is even better is that AndroidXR does have familiar window management so users don't have to learn things twice. I want to have this be successful.
This is cool, but I'm mostly sad the future of computing is so closed. I can already see that you're not going to be allowed to do a lot of things on these devices to the point that they're useless, like iPhones.
Google's announcements around these things always scare me. So many references to Google Play and their own services, its hard to tell if this will be open like Android itself or some locked down appliance like the Vision Pro. Its no surprise Apple chose to follow the iPhone model since it's so profitable for them, I'm not sure Google has the same incentives so maybe they wont copy that part.
It seems like even Android being "open" these days is an incomplete story, as it's almost more like a barebones Linux kernel build with some bare UI and libraries now, rather than a mobile OS distribution with standard apps that vendors can build on.
You seemingly have to do everything yourself, which begs the question why not just go full blown Linux distribution, and throw on some sort of Android app emulation?
I largely agree, especially when focused on consumer devices. Professionally I'm building a product built on top of AOSP, and it's been really nice to have a standard target and all the tooling that Android brings. It could be better but the base AOSP does have a lot of value as a general purpose OS.
I'm in the midst of debating moving us to just Linux or sticking with Android, and the list of things to replace isn't insignificant.
you can blame the FTC for that, google is getting antitrusted because they built android as an open ecosystem and then tried to monopolize it, whereas apple gets mostly free reign over their walled garden. it reads to me that the message from the FTC is to vertically integrate and wall off everything, and open nothing.
That’s a weird way to say the FTC is being consistent. Google marketed Android as open but didn’t mean it, while Apple never promised otherwise. While I’d like both to be more open, there seems to be a clear message that you need to give consumers what you sold them.
Android (XR) is a lot more open than iOS (visionOS).
Is there any information on this or you simply mean they're working with out of house hardware?
The "Gemini era"? Really? This press release is obnoxious. Nearly zero relevant technical or business details. The only thing I got here is that Samsung is releasing a headset of unspecified type next year running Android and Google is helping with the software. There is nothing else new or interesting in this announcement. Maybe someday someone else will be able to make some kind of other compatible device too but it sounds like a far-off possibility rather than anything imminent.
Given the abject failure of Daydream as a platform it's hard to see how Google being involved is going to improve anything. In fact, this is worse than status quo because it means Google apps like YouTube and Photos and Earth VR will likely be limited in functionality or simply not present on competing platforms like Vision Pro or Quest for the foreseeable future.
Anyone know of low priced glasses that can extend monitor into virtual displays in VR? So far I see the lenovo VR set able to do this.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/12/11/immer... announced very recently
Yes my research showed that Meta can do this via partnership. And that makes me wonder do others need partnerships as well?
There are a few remote desktop type apps for the Quest. The partnership is primarily a branding exercise, I would assume.
https://visor.com and https://immersed.com
Immersed works with lots of VR headsets, Visor is their bespoke HW shipping in '25
In theory. In practice, they have failed to demonstrate a single fully functional headset to any external media, and their marketing strategy is borderline predatory ("lock in a better price for your subscription before it's too late!")
I'll believe it when I see it.
The day after the botched demo they had a few of the community members over to their AirBnB for a more hands on demo. Those people have spoken in the discord on their experience
They have been keeping with updates as best they can, production lines are starting up, but they also have large orgs like Qualcomm dictating how much they can share. They are not keen to upset their suppliers
I think Xreal will likely be your best option right now, but there software support is not so good. Youll likely go down the rabbit hole and learn about viture and rokid and make more informed decision.
I've got the Viture glasses. There's no support for Linux aside from working as a basic HDMI display over USB-C (so no head tracking, the screen stays welded to the same spot). The Spacewalker app on Android is basically a web / media browser, zero productivity. You can't use it like a launcher and launch other apps. There's Taskbar and Second Screen but these don't work on my Sony Xperia (you don't get window controls like resize, move or close). There is a paid app for Linux that uses the Viture SDK. It's supposed to be decent but I couldn't get it working during the free trial (I'm using OpenSuse Tumbleweed). TBH I got totally fed up with the glasses and lost interest in trying anything further.
So this announcement is actually interesting to me.
Watching their videos makes me sea sick after a few seconds and I wonder if they should have posted those as 60 fps videos.
Google is struggling to catch up so hard that they're only now just working on their metaverse play
Happy that quantum computing breakthrough and AI 2.0 launches came out "first". Happy for "metaverse" to be a distant distant distant 3rd.
I'm thinking how this will improve wayfinding for the blind. Amazing opportunities here.
Great, so maybe the Viture Pro that gather dust on my shelf will become useful.
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Stop trying to make VR happen, it's not gonna happen
I want AR glasses, not VR helmets!
Everyone does. This is another step towards that. The top comment says Google has been stop-and-go about this. Well the tech was never there to do it. But they never really stopped playing with the idea. Since 2013.
The current paradigm of outward facing digital cameras passing through to screens is idiotic IMO.
Yeah, the Hololens 2 is still my favorite device and experience. Quite upset Microsoft axed the project and team
Have you tried it?
No, I have no interest
Recently I realized that what I want out of a personal computer is a Unix terminal. And that’s actually pretty weird and far from how most people use a computer.
PowerPoint, adobe video editing products. And all those things look unnecessary and complex to me.
But I have to acknowledge a few facts: 1. I’m not as young and open to new experiences. I mostly want to refine workflows I already know. 2. I understand computers better than most people. 3. I’m less interested in screen entertainment because I work on computers.
There will be people who grow up with stuff and they will have experiences in VR that are meaningful and they won’t use a computer like you or I.
You're missing out on some pretty awesome experiences
The horizon VR game on psvr2, yeah. And of course Puzzling places.
VR is fuuuuun.
VTOL VR
Down the Rabbit Hole
Trover Saves the Universe (mostly because I'm a Rick & Morty fan)
fyi, all my friends now have VR. We play it every other day to socialize.
It'll definitely happen, we just don't know when (unless nuclear war).
Why is there no pictures of the actual headset anywhere?
The verge review has a picture of the headset: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319528/google-android-...
There is no actual headset. Its an OS they're offering to hardware partners.
That's probably announced in a separate Samsung press release.
The similarities with Vision OS are insane.
Considering how little the difference is in phone UIs, one would expect XR UIs to be highly similar as well
I'm holding out for Android One
Someone at Google actually got Apple to kill the Juno app on vOS because they decided to make this. Imagine that being your job.
Is it just me, or is this a really bad website?
If I jumped into any of the experiences by clicking the blue dot, it seems to stutter for 2 - 3 seconds before the video starts, there is no audio even though it seems like there should be?
I'm on an M1 Macbook Pro, tried Chrome and Firefox both.
I know Google has been hard chasing profits given the current financial climate, but I'm a little surprised by the drop in quality here.
A couple of years ago I came to the possession of a Google daydream VR. It sat for a little while because my phone was old. Then I got to upgrade to a Pixel 5 and one of the first things that excited me was the ability to explore the headset.
To my disappointment the two products, both coming out of Google, were incompatible even though they were only 2 years apart.
I don't believe that flip floppy culture has had a reason to change.
I hope we don't see bloggers using it in the shower this time.
im most interested in producytivity
Google and Samsung going against Meta sounds as much as a cursed alliance than it was with GearVR.
I trust Samsung to execute excellently on the hardware and be ready to iterate, but will Google keep pushing the platform even if Meta also goes after regular android apps and crushes them commercially ?
Now that regulators are on Google's back, Meta getting accesss to the whole Play Store or at least being protected from Google's shenanigans is realistic, and the Meta store could potentially be decently competitive for regular android apps as well if they want to.
Knowing how Google shuts down or forgets about products that don't make them a million billion dollars, I wouldn't invest into Google's XR ecosystem.
Do you remember Google also has an ecosystem for Android Tablets and Wearables? Do THEY remember?
Meta could sink in all that money because Zuck is really into that stuff.
What do you mean? They just released new tablet and watch hardware and accompanying OS updates.
Yes, the Pixel Tablet is now 1 year old.
Next move:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/21/24302508/google-pixel-ta...
I worked on the launches of many Android devices and actually worked on the OOBE of the GearVR, and it was by far the hairiest of them all, including the Nexus 10, where the Google execs made it to like Chicago before accepting that Hurricane Sandy wasn’t something imaginary cooked up to mess up their launch.
I'll take Google and Samsung over Meta.
Until Meta stops trying to force me to open an account to view things that should be publicly available i'll never be on board with them gaining more power. Not to mention that I believe their products are a net negative to society.
I'm not sure what you're pointing at precisely, is it the closing of Oculus account support and the aftermath ?
If so, is Google's Play Store allowing users with no Google account to download the apks ? Or the Google Nest Hub if we want to stay on hardware platforms.
The current ad infested and SEO bound internet comes straight from Google's influence. Same way current android repeated most of Apple's dark patterns, with all the blackmailing phone makers on the side.
TBH comparing Google and Meta feels like closing both eyes and choosing if the right side is darker than the left (I'm not saying we should forgive any, I just don't see one having a moral high ground at this point)
Most Quest users don't care about anything you said, and apparently their devices are selling very well.
"Very well" is subjective - they sold only something like 1 million devices, which is way below even Google Pixel phone numbers.
But regardless, i stated my position, not other people's position.
Yes, but also there's LLaMA
The hilarious thing is that Google already had a VR platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream that they abandoned. Meta even offered to put Google Play on their headsets, but Google refused.
Same. I am afraid this won't go even as well as Wear OS watches or Android tablets.
Let's wait and see if apps will be 30% cheaper on Meta's store.
For anyone curious, current Quest Store fees are probably still 30%
https://www.techradar.com/news/metas-quest-2-game-store-fees...
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Honestly there's no point in Android XR.
We can't trust Google to maintain even profitable endeavours past a couple years.
And an investment in AR/VR hardware and software is likely over a decade long initiative.
IMO They're already showing there weak amount of determination by making this a partnership out of the gate.
Thats a bag of misaligned incentives, diluted returns and 2x as many execs who could kill the project.
this is getting downvoted, but it's not a bad take. Google has proven, over and over, that it's unable to execute on any long running initiative like this - including 3 past botched XR initiatives
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3rd day of announcements from Google, looks like Google is also celebrating 12 days ship-mas anonymously.
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To be fair the Android they bought was trying to be a Blackberry clone, Google did the legwork on turning it into an iOS clone.
I wish they'd been more inspired by PalmOS.
… and did a massive pivot to copy the iPhone when that launched in 2007. It made sense from the perspective of protecting search but let’s be honest about the real motivation.
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All tablets are dying. The pixel watch 3 has excellent reviews, what's botched about it ?
> All tablets are dying.
Highly disagree. The iPad line is very strong, especially in the artist community.
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They already botched XR twice by killing Cardboard and Daydream. You're right, third time's gotta be the charm.
and from related they also killed: Google Glasses, Project Tango (3d cameras). ARCore also seems pretty much barely alive.
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I see no other reason for this than to show to investors "yeah can also do the Apple thing" - most probably to not have to sink something that was probably developed head to head with Vision Pro before.
Expect to not really hear from this again.
Crafted by Rajat
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