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i have a feeling you are going to come to regret this comment. google has made the right move here. they've introduced VR capabilities to the android platform in a way that, unlike cardboard, will set a baseline good experience for users (performance, frame rate, thermal, etc.) they've introduced a low price point, casual piece of hardware that will get good VR into as many consumers' hands as possible. the have made it so 3rd party vendors can compete in the ecosystem. they are providing an open platform for building and distributing VR software. they have included a controller peripheral as part of the standard which radically increases the surface area of applications.

basically, to me this is the path that seems the most likely vector for mass market VR adoption. the high end PC VR is too expensive in 2016, and the console based VR, while definitely compelling, still has at least one order of magnitude less addressable market.

iterating from here to more standalone devices like those shared already by qualcomm is an obvious transition on this platform and I'd imagine most VR devices sold in 2017-2018 will be portable standalone HMDs running android.

I don't ever regret having an opinion and sharing it, at least so long as I don't get annoyed and my tone gets away from me.

I hear what you're saying, but I just don't buy any of it. I DO agree that this is the kind of product that needs to take off if VR at home (given current technology, we should remember) is going to take off, and my reply to that is VR at home given current technology will remain niche for the foreseeable future.

Right now we're playing with Tamagotchis and calling them virtual pets, when the real virtual pets will be cool owls. What we call VR today will be as lasting and as useful as an Aibo - more something that should get us excited about what the future will actually bring, instead of what current tech companies try to fool us into getting hyped about today.

Yeah, and unlike gaming VR, I think mobile VR has the potential to truly catch on and spread. It's cheap (80$ vs. 600$+), it's easy to use (no wires or crazy rig needed), and you can use it anywhere (lay on the bed, use outside).

Well, no. As of today it's $685 + $80. In the future if you either already have the phone or if the magical "partners who have signed up" start delivering Daydream-capable phones then it's only $80. And I'm not trying to be pedantic - if this was, say, supported on many phones then I'd agree with you. But your argument is essentially that a product only useable on an itty bitty tiny fraction (well, okay, today nobody) of the cell phone market is going to push VR into the home. That seems highly unlikely to me.

So I am currently working on a game for Daydream VR. I jumped at the opportunity as soon as they made the announcement and bought a 6P to help with the dev and testing. I agree with the commenter that mentioned Daydream is more likely to spike mass market interest than say Vive. I lurk on the Unreal Engine forums quite a bit and participated in a few game jams and if there is something I have noticed it is that Vive and Oculus are currently reserved for serious VR enthusiasts and marketing stunts (pretty obvious I suppose). The barriers to entry and use are just still too high. Cost of VR hardware makes it a no no for most, and having to prop sensors up around your lounge and hang cables from your roof can make things very unsexy very quickly.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is that there is a hell of a lot of hype about VR at the moment, and not just in the enthusiast circles. So if someone can lower that barrier to entry to a reasonable level where your semi-early adopters can partake and start showing off their gear at work and with friends then I think it is likely to see success.

I don't think there will be any shortage of content creation, and I also don't think the argument about available phones is too valid. The current race that is underway with phone creators to develop the next best phone paired with the obsession of people to own the best phone will make sure a lot of people are walking around with VR ready phones in no time.

I hope this wasn't completely incoherent, but this conversation also reminds me of this : https://xkcd.com/1497/

Yes, you're right, but this is a phone that thousands of people will get either way, regardless of the VR, just for the phone itself.

No one will ever buy a 600-800$ VR headset for anything else than using it in VR. And that's the ONLY thing it will be used for.

The phone will be used every single day of your life for doing everything, from messaging people, watching videos, browsing the web, playing games, etc.

If you want this to be a fair comparison, then also include the 1000$+ gaming rig you'd need for the VR headset to work.

Why do you care what is possible (literally) today? Clearly this is meant to steer the direction of the entire android ecosystem in a direction where many android phones will be VR capable. It will (potentially) have massive effects on the actual capabilities of the phones people have in their pockets once they roll over to new ones in the coming years, than had it not been done. To your point about price, the thinking is obviously that the differential cost to go from a non-VR user to a VR user if you are purchasing a cell phone in 2017-2018 will be tens of dollars. Unless daydream capable phones are significantly more expensive (and those additional costs are not going anywhere other than for the VR capabilities), then the price of the headset will be the effective cost to a consumer to be able to gain access to VR.

The reason GearVR exists is because your average android phone cannot perform well enough to provide a good VR experience. It requires specific engineering that would not otherwise be done for the common day to day smartphone use cases. Daydream is meant to be a holistic solution to that problem. I guess it sounds to me like you're disappointed that nobody can wave a magic wand and make current android devices VR capable, but sadly enough it does require better sensors, thermal characteristics, and general graphics performance than what any off the shelf android phone can do today.

There are a lot of ways google could have executed on the idea "how do we try to make mobile VR take off" that would have had major problems. The way they've actually done it to me seems the best of all possible worlds. You can question if mobile VR is a viable avenue to mass market adoption of VR, but if you assume that's a goal worth persuing, then critique daydream from there. For me, it certainly seems to me, based on raw numbers alone, to have the highest potential. But even if it turns out to be a poor concept, I can't imagine a better way to execute on trying to prove if it is than what they've done here.

Other manufacturers are likely all scrambling to catch the VR train so they aren't left behind. I expect all top-end phones to support VR within the next 2 years, if not 1 year. So within that time the cost will fall down to $80.

Dude. It's a $79 strap that puts your phone in front of your face. It's a cool toy. They're obviously not trying to compete with Oculus with this. What are you ranting on about?

And in a lot of places, it'll come for free with the phone. I know Fi is doing it, and I think Verizon might too. I know friends that got Gear VR for free along with their Samsung phones.

Do they use it?

I imagine the novelty wears off pretty fast, but the wow factor for first time users is pretty awesome. I would say just taking it to work/friends and sharing that experience makes it more worthwhile and also aids the VR cause! :)

A valid question. I used cardboard once. I stopped using it as I got dizzy, and secondly my wife took a photo of me whilst I was using it and it became obvious that I looked completely ridiculous.

At least with other game forms and controllers (eg xbox/playstation/even Nintendo chuck) you don't look completely ridiculous using them.

1) A new product standard that will be supported by all upcoming flagship Android phones. Your criticism is that they're announcing something ... new?

2) Providing a cheap VR experience for everyone seems pretty reasonable. It fills out the price/performance curve between Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, and probably doesn't suck. Finally, since it's so cheap, they can literally give it away to all Pixel pre-orders.

Also, they're building on a VR platform established by Cardboard. While Cardboard was an obviously cheap experience, it was also a 20% project / experiment that I'm glad they released. Why not enable your developers to build fun / cheap experiences?

> but it's honestly baffling to me how these threads aren't peppered with what I would think to be well-justified skepticism

Are we visiting the same site? I see nothing but negativity in threads about Google.

I thought it was a rule on HN that every thread about Google must have at least one complaint about reader.

I'd say the GearVR is the more production-ready version of Cardboard, but requires a specific phone that only a segment of customers have. I own a GearVR and S7, and Daydream seems very similar to that hardware while addressing a few of the out-of-the-box issues that GearVR has:

1. GearVR has no controller. Daydream's controller provides both direct and motion input.

2. GearVR has decent resolution with the S7. Phone resolutions should only improve over time, and so will the experience (particularly the screen-door effect).

3. The GearVR hardware is hard plastic and a little uncomfortable after 30-45 minutes. This headset seems to go to some length to avoid that problem.

4. From what I understand, the GearVR has high-resolution sensors inside of it to offload some of that processing from the phone. This has the effect of tightly coupling the GearVR hardware to Samsung, since they're the only ones making compatible hardware (to my knowledge). Daydream is more of a reference, so there will soon be more compatible phones out there.

5. Publishing apps to GearVR requires going through Oculus (Facebook), period. On the S7, plugging into the GearVR is actually a hard shortcut to Oculus. You may not agree that Google is better, but I doubt it's going to be as walled-in.

i think points 4 and 5 are massive ones that people aren't seeing past. The GearVR was better than cardboard because of the improved IMU + scheduling preemption. These are things people always glaze over because they're obviously too technical for consumers to care about.

Now Google is setting a standard and while before there was no reason for VR ready IMUs in phones, now phones will have the proper heardware and Anrdoid N low latency mode to hopefully make them as capable as an S7+GearVR out of the box. This integration is a massive step in the right direction. It's VR pushing manufacturers to reconsider what the "basic" phone looks like.

So sure, let's all pretend that wearing a pair of underwear on your face stuffed with a cell phone is going to advance VR. Yeah. That seems totally plausible.

Your comment is not going to age well.

Shall we come back in a year and see how it did?

Tell you what, let's try this. In a year (let's say next 10/1/17, easy to remember) we'll start a timer. How long to do you think that timer will run before Google makes a single press release, blog post, software update or even any other mention of Daydream? That is, after one year, what do you think their commitment to Daydream will be, measured by even a whisper of talk about it, or any evidence at all it hasn't been wholly abandoned?

I'm willing to bet that timer runs forever.

Considering Daydream is effectively the next iteration of Cardboard, I'm also happy to take that bet.

Happy to take that bet.

How much is buy in to the pool?

I don't think Google has been bad when it comes to hardware. They are not a hardware company but they try to do interesting things. They were way ahead of the curve with Glass which was technically solid for the time but marketed horribly. They were the first to nudge VR towards mobile/mass adoption with cardboard...an idea that quite frankly I don't think many companies would even think about trying.

I think they have good teams for both AR and VR in place and they are committed to both. With AR they are probably back to wait and see but I doubt they are not thinking about/working on a Glass followup.

This VR google is a direct iteration on cardboard. I think their message is pretty clearly "we think people have cell phones and they ought to be good enough for first gen VR experiences". There's plenty of non-hardware issues to work on when it comes to VR so I sympathize with the position (I did preorder the Sony VR which should arrive soon as I think that's a potential hardware sweetspot).

Pixel I know nothing about and have no opinion about but they have been tremendously helpful in getting better cell phones into our hands from the software side by working on Android. I actually think the modern Android experience is quite a bit nicer than the modern iPhone experience.

I think it's a bit silly to expect a (software) company to have spectacular launch after spectacular launch. Those aren't easy things, failure is the most likely outcome. Google does seem to be invested in the right spaces and certainly seems to have smart people working for them.

Edit: And obviously it's a great prototyping tool if it'll be supported by the major engines. I'll gladly take a more comfortable cardboard to quickly prototype some VR ideas. As a bonus I get it on less powerful hardware so I have a good "worst case"

Chromecast is pretty amazing

I dumped mine as soon as I tried the fire TV stick.

Basically yeah, it looks like Cardboard was their prototype / tech demo, and this is their "ok that worked, let's make it into a product" version.

We need to get past the idea of strapping a phone to your face as "VR". It's not. It's a neat toy that is interesting for a few hours, and that's it.

The bare minimum for VR is what Valve has achieved with the Vive: full 6 degree of freedom tracking with tracked hand controls. Anything less is a toy and a distraction that is poisoning the well of public perception.

Very well written criticism. I agree with most points you made specially the fact that if google wants VR to go main stream and really cares about users it should have put more emphasis in Cardboard which works for all phones including iPhone.

Putting more emphasis on proprietary headset and phone shows only one reason behind this move - they want to make $$ selling Phones and VR headsets.