Android XR
blog.google
blog.google
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.
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.
You may still have a broader point that's worth considering but I don't think it negates my characterization of their issues entirely.
> That's basically Google's strategy on everything.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Sketchfab viewer still supports Cardboard: https://sketchfab.com/models/45f5e56887f44075bbf283977c99541...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
... wat? Are you suggesting Google has two different services both called Google wallet?
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?
I let my password manager handle it now.
Yeah, it was dumb having your app change names and slightly looks, but materially, little changed.
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.
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.
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.
They mostly talk about PlayStore analytics and marketing approaches, seldom about game technology or design.
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.
What do you mean by this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Isn’t that just Niantic? They spun out of G and made Ingress and Pokemon Go
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Strawman; n.b. iOS solved that in 2009.
On a VR headset multiple cameras are constantly recording.
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 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
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.
Reading the dev blog or the actual documentation was more informative to me:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/12/introducin...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's boiling the frog. Unthinkable, until everybody is doing it and it's normal.
Ah! So that’s why Androids always have bigger batteries than iPhones. ;)
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.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2450052/do-smartphones-liste...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
As it allows you to use the device without having to move your arms around.
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.
> 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.
Also relevant, queue the spiderman pointing at spiderman meme.
I do agree that the biggest innovation comes from the software, but come on.
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
It's true that Google and Apple are in a unique position to leverage their walled gardens. I'm not sure that needs normalizing.
Good thread outlining the comparison
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
For some strange reason they never saw fit to put Windows arm on it.
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.
I got the glass second-hand super cheap but that was way too expensive new as well.
Google Glass
Anyway this discussion is starting to sound like Slashdot circa 1999...
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.
As for the rest, I'm just pissed off with people throwing their words into my mouth. Oh there we go again.
Seemingly feels unlikely, due to the cost perhaps, but it would upend things a bit, put these bigger companies on their toes.
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've always had it too because I already had a developer account with them since the first Rift devkit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, timing wise, this being just announced... is it gonna ship straight into a market collapse?
Is this anecdotal or is there a source? I’d be interested to learn more.
I thought there was also a report from one of the big consultancy firms but I need to search for that.
OpenXR, WebXR. Even visionOS is actually xrOS if you look at the SDK.
I guess we'll see.
Enough time has passed that this doesn't feel like a real concern.
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.
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.
Samsung should license Google App store, but retain full control for executing a product launch.
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 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.
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.
(at least they avoided 5g and blockchain... for now)
Let's all get invested... not.
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).
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.
Need my dopamine!!! Then endorphins, go go go!
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.
You lost this one to Facebook, like you did messaging.
You're going to kill it in a few months anyway.
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.
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'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.
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.
Immersed works with lots of VR headsets, Visor is their bespoke HW shipping in '25
I'll believe it when I see it.
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
So this announcement is actually interesting to me.
VR is fuuuuun.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Trover Saves the Universe (mostly because I'm a Rick & Morty fan)
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.
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.
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 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.
https://www.techradar.com/news/metas-quest-2-game-store-fees...
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.
Next move:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/21/24302508/google-pixel-ta...
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.
But regardless, i stated my position, not other people's position.
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)
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.
Highly disagree. The iPad line is very strong, especially in the artist community.
Expect to not really hear from this again.