Every year at Google I/O, people expect big news. This year was no exception. There were dozens of announcements regarding new developments to Google’s huge swath of platforms and products. If you’ve been following the buzz surrounding virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality lately, you know that Google was supposed to make a major announcement regarding its virtual reality projects.
There’s Google Cardboard, which has made its way into the hands, heads and eyes of 10 million people so far, including 1,300,000 New York Times subscribers. Google Jump is partly a GoPro Odyssey rig that has 16 HDR cameras set in a circular array that allows users to capture 360-degree stereoscopic video. For the next part, users upload their videos into Jump Assembler, a stitching software created by Google to “sew” together 16 simultaneously recorded videos.
Google also launched Tilt Brush, a 3D painting application for the HTC Vive virtual reality headset that appears to give users control over a luminous and abstract digital medium. You just need to download it from Steam, the popular gaming and entertainment platform. Expeditions, Google’s virtual reality platform for education, consists of 150 “journeys” composed by selected teachers and content partners. Students use Google Cardboard to access immersive virtual reality experiences of environments they could never go to on any ordinary field trip.
There have also been a couple of recent appointments and hires that reflect Google’s increased interest in virtual reality. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, appointed Clay Bevor to vice president of virtual reality. Bevor was better suited there, as he’d been spending an increasing amount of time working on virtual reality projects after overseeing Google Cardboard since it launched in 2014. Google also hired Josh Carpenter, who helped lead Mozilla VR’s research team with its work on A-Frame and WebVR.
In the context of all of this activity from Google in virtual reality, Project Daydream was announced at Google I/O 2016. Project Daydream was not an actual virtual reality headset ready for sale and distribution, as many expected, but was instead a hardware design for a viewer, and a new version of Google’s popular Android operating system. Project Daydream will eventually be an inexpensive headset and microcontroller produced and released by Google this fall.
In a way, Google’s approach to Project Daydream is designed to be implemented and adopted by the hardware manufacturers in the virtual reality industry in the way that its Android operating system was adopted by smartphone makers like Samsung. When Google created the Android OS software, it provided an example of how the OS could be used in a smartphone, which is why it began producing Nexus smartphones. But Android really took off when others (namely Samsung) designed and produced smartphone hardware for it.
Similarly, Project Daydream involves a new “VR-ready” version of the Android OS called Android N. Android N will then be adopted by a fresh wave of smartphones due out next year from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Xiaomi, ZTE, Asus, LG and Alcatel. Huawei, which makes Google’s Nexus smartphones, manufactures the Nexus 6P, which is currently the only smartphone that can run Daydream right now. There is still no word on what the “N” in “Android N” stands for, although Google is asking the public for ideas.
If you manage to get hold of the unreleased Daydream Viewer, here’s what the experience will be like: You plunk your Android N smartphone into it just like Google Cardboard, but you don’t fiddle with headset buttons (or magnets) on the side of the viewer: you control the viewer with a small handheld controller.
You open up Daydream Home, where you can access relatively mundane things in virtual reality. For example, you can get lost in Google’s Street View, mill around the Play Store, as well as watch movies and look at photos.
At Google I/O, the company also announced that it would release a YouTube app built for virtual reality. That’s right, 360-degree videos are getting their own section for endless YouTube perusals. Formatted specifically for Daydream’s controller, you can point and click different videos without having to jerk your neck right or left to indicate which video to watch. But the Daydream controller can’t grab anything. It’s like having a stick to point at things instead of a hand, which you can see and use in Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality.
The strategy for implementing Android N is smart, but like the 3D printing hype that peaked in 2014, there are no killer apps in sight, and lots of similar technology with different plastic exoskeletons.
Project Daydream is certainly a step-up from Google Cardboard, but the content has to catch fire. $15,000 for Google/GoPro Odyssey is still prohibitively expensive to democratize the creation of virtual reality content effectively on a big scale.