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Comment by yathern | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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.

Why exactly was the promotion motivation bad?

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

>> 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.

>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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Google_payment_apps

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.

That is genuinely jaw-dropping.

Wait till you see Google Jaw and then witness Google drop it.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42404117

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.

> Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud

What do you mean by this?

See https://www.engadget.com/2014-03-10-titanfall-cloud-explaine...

Ah TF1, TF2 (err... hmm... that's something else) had a normal campaign, and a very very good one at that.

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).

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

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 did have a games studio.

and shut it down

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.

> 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.

It's going to be years before game studios even consider working with them again after the Stadia disaster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://killedbygoogle.com

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