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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

>Google has bailed on VR apps

Yeah, whats up with that? Unless its all under wraps, Google is letting what lead they had whither away. Its silly to think they had working inside out tracking (Tango) in 2014.

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"Bailed" is a bit over the top. I would characterize it more as being at a stand still.

Earth VR and Tilt Brush are still around, and as mentioned about, Tilt Brush is even open sourced. They just haven't had as much interest making new stuff. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward.

Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. Cardboard was neat but just that.

Tiltbrush is opensource, but not actively being maintained by Google and hasn't been for a long time. Some of the original team is involved in maintaining an opensource fork, however, but this is not a Google product. Daydream was sunset a while ago and cardboard support has stopped also. VR is an interesting category for Google because there are often no services to maintain in VR apps. So, like an indie developer with a failed game, they can leave their VR apps on the Steam store with zero maintainence as long as SteamVR works. There are zero employees working on Google's VR apps except for Owlchemy, which I suspect is still around because they cost very little or they're profitable. Google Poly, which is a service related to VR, is getting shutdown.

As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.

You kinda alluded to this, and kinda got the wrong conclusion, but when a game developer releases a complete game, and then after fixing some patches, it moves on to other things, no one claims that they "bailed out" on the game. Do you think Valve "bailed out" on HL:Alyx? It just makes no sense.

Earth VR and Tilt Brush are pretty complete apps, not everything needs to be worked on forever. At some point you get diminishing return and start wasting your time.

>Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR.

They had inside out headsets before Oculus. Check out their partnership with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo headset. Despite working well for 6dof tracking it had the same terrible Daydream controller.

A year later Oculus released the quest with a better industrial design, camera array and 6dof controllers to much more success. The chip was a generation newer but arguably the success came from things that could have happened a year sooner.

Not just that, the Mirage Solo cameras create a _much_ more believable stereo image when you get pass-through. It's my favorite pass-through system. Have you seen the Rift S pass-through image? Horrendous. Quest is also terrible, but Rift S is just unbelievably bad.

It's standard Google practise to abandon old projects and move onto fresh new ones. It's due to how the internal promotion system works. Everyone should be aware of this by now..

Technology enthusiasts (read: HN users) may not like it, but it's a business practice that's working as intended. Sometimes Google may seem shortsighted but often times they're just measuring the market correctly.

I worked on AR/VR at Google and the projects have mostly paused because there's no visible financial benefit. No one in the real world cares enough about VR to justify it as a business. We prototyped hundreds of applications—every idea you can possibly think of—and all of them are either impractical with today's technology, or not useful enough to bother putting a VR headset on your head.

AR/VR is one of those things that feels so magical that you think, "There must be amazing things we can do with it!" but it turns out there's not. At least not yet. The situation is pretty clear because Facebook, Apple, and Google all bet big on AR/VR and all of them have stalled indefinitely.

You can say that but Microsoft just landed a $21B AR contract, the Quest2 has sold 2-3 million units and Apple is poised to enter the wearable market.

I'm not surprised when Google walks away from things, but this seems premature and short sighted.

Yeah the Microsoft contract is up to $21B, and it's over 10 years. It's also a military contract, which is a different beast from consumer goods.

And if the Quest 2 has sold 2-3 million units so far, that's unremarkable. The Apple Watch was considered a failure in its first year and it made 10 million sales. We've already passed Christmas so you're not going to see a further spike in sales.

If Apple enters the market it might reignite the spark. Apple can do that because they deliver extremely high quality products that inspire people. Google can't do that because it's not in the company DNA and Googlers knows it, so it's a waste of time.

And yet there was a recent re-org at Facebook so now the AR/VR focused Reality Labs division headcount is approx 10,000

Thanks for commenting - like others, I'm a big VR fan and hugely perplexed by how Google has walked away from it. Leaving us with Facebook is a horrible outcome and locked-in Apple not much better. Even if I'm disappointed by what you say, its really helpful to know this was the thought process within Google.

I guess I think Google is taking a huge risk here by taking their hat out of the ring so early. Even if others have slowed their investment, Microsoft/Apple/Facebook are under the radar continuing very significant work and it really feels like we could flip over a tipping point and Google might be way behind. This may be more like gcloud than Android and they could find themselves a decade behind other players.

My personal use case is being able to have any number of monitors of any size and shape, eg: [0]. So far its been limited by screen resolution and lack of good hand tracking and dedicated accessories, but these are very close to being solved with the next gen. devices.

[0] https://twitter.com/oculus/status/1286345820699340801/photo/...

Oculus isn't your only alternative. I've been very happy with Vive, especially the Cosmos, and I've heard great things about Valve's Index.

If you're on more of a budget the PSVR is quite good if you happen to have a PS4.

Yes - its just so unfortunate all the good alternatives don't offer (easy, cheap) wireless / stand alone support. After using Virtual Desktop, I actually think there's a huge opportunity for a super "thin client" device that is just a companion for your laptop/tablet and offloads everything there.

I think the problem is that you really need quite high resolution and frame rate for it to be a good enough experience to be worth the hassle. Which then means you need a lot of GPU power, more than your typical laptop or tablet can offer.

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