> Seems like a very similar direction to visionOS.
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.
I think Apple picked the right direction to launch with as their primary interaction method.
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.
There is a recent rumor that they have been working with Sony to bring the PSVR 2 controllers to work on visionOS.
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.
How did you come to that conclusion? Vision Pro sales seem to be quite poor and there's very little developer buy-in. The biggest use case for VR today is gaming, and Apple essentially decided to opt out of that market with their flagship VR product.
Fwiw HorizonOS does support hand tracking (at least in the Quest 3 which I have) and you can navigate the UI without controllers. It works quite well.
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 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.
> Project Moohan felt like a mix between a Meta Quest 3 and Vision Pro headset.
> 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.
To be fair, a lot of the Vision Pro is a copy of all the AR/VR things that came before it. Even the eye tracking and gesture tracking is/was not new by any extent when Apple implemented it. That's kind of how these things work (whether it should or not is a different discussion). There's very little actual innovation because innovation is risky, and the bigger the company the less real appetite there is for risk because that's how executives get fired. The direction flows down from there. Most engineers at these companies who have good ideas and really want to innovate have to (and often want to) leave and do their own startup. These big companies are quite happy to let the startups do the innovating and take all the risk, and then just buying them out or ripping them off once there's a demonstration that there's a market. With increased regulatory scrutiny, the latter seems to be getting more common, but that's also a different discussion.
Also relevant, queue the spiderman pointing at spiderman meme.
So the crappy face in the front, the pods for the sound, the dedicated chip for all the AR functions, and the separation of battery and headset are copies of everybody else?
I do agree that the biggest innovation comes from the software, but come on.
> So the crappy face in the front, the pods for the sound, the dedicated chip for all the AR functions, and the separation of battery and headset are copies of everybody else?
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
It’s very convenient that anything newly brought to market is not an innovation because it was presented as a concept somehwere but anything that isn’t new is simply a copy.
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!
Perhaps you could actually read my sentence and say that it allows running Android apps natively as a first class citizen. Which is also part of the linked press release.
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.
In this case I think they are missing a lot of deserved credit. A ton of UI paradigms, established by visionOS, are taken wholesale in XR. Even down to the styling of the developer docs
In theory. In practice, they have failed to demonstrate a single fully functional headset to any external media, and their marketing strategy is borderline predatory ("lock in a better price for your subscription before it's too late!")
The day after the botched demo they had a few of the community members over to their AirBnB for a more hands on demo. Those people have spoken in the discord on their experience
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
I think Xreal will likely be your best option right now, but there software support is not so good. Youll likely go down the rabbit hole and learn about viture and rokid and make more informed decision.
I've got the Viture glasses. There's no support for Linux aside from working as a basic HDMI display over USB-C (so no head tracking, the screen stays welded to the same spot). The Spacewalker app on Android is basically a web / media browser, zero productivity. You can't use it like a launcher and launch other apps. There's Taskbar and Second Screen but these don't work on my Sony Xperia (you don't get window controls like resize, move or close). There is a paid app for Linux that uses the Viture SDK. It's supposed to be decent but I couldn't get it working during the free trial (I'm using OpenSuse Tumbleweed). TBH I got totally fed up with the glasses and lost interest in trying anything further.
So this announcement is actually interesting to me.
I love the navigation video example. It's so much better than staring down at a cell phone. At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to style (looking at you, Apple Vision Pro).
I'd wish for arrows and directive lines overlayed straight at eye level at the actual turning points. Basically video game style.
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.
For navigation to work in VR, location services have to accurately know where you are and which way you're facing, which they don't. Compasses don't work in most urban situations because there's too much magnetic metal around you. Visual localization does work but the map has to be up to date.
It's so much better than staring down at a cell phone.
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.
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 was assuming that VR headsets or AR glasses would become mainstream at some point, like smartphones or tablets, with various Chinese manufacturers competing for the best price. But maybe you are right and that's too optimistic.
They've been around for awhile now and it's still not mainstream. What's holding people back now? Quest is pretty affordable. The quality is pretty good. You think a sleeker form factor will finally tip the scales?
Google and Samsung going against Meta sounds as much as a cursed alliance than it was with GearVR.
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.
I worked on the launches of many Android devices and actually worked on the OOBE of the GearVR, and it was by far the hairiest of them all, including the Nexus 10, where the Google execs made it to like Chicago before accepting that Hurricane Sandy wasn’t something imaginary cooked up to mess up their launch.
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.
I'm not sure what you're pointing at precisely, is it the closing of Oculus account support and the aftermath ?
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)
The hilarious thing is that Google already had a VR platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream that they abandoned.
Meta even offered to put Google Play on their headsets, but Google refused.
Some of the mockups here look eerily like those from Google Glass. Somehow I doubt walking around with head mounted cameras beaming everything to the cloud is suddenly going to become OK, though there is definitely a generational shift on that.
this is getting downvoted, but it's not a bad take. Google has proven, over and over, that it's unable to execute on any long running initiative like this - including 3 past botched XR initiatives
Endeavors like this have failed before, but at some point (soon would be my guess) the utility of having an AI assistant with vision capability will just be too useful to resist putting an always available camera in glasses.
I'm not sure I trust Google enough to walk around my home wearing their cameras. The last thing I want to see are ads based on the contents of my home or specific details of my family.
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.
But (odds are) you trust them enough to walk around your home wearing their microphone. Letting them listen in on all your conversations and show you ads based on those, if the conspiracy theories are true. (Unless if you're an iPhone user, then you trust Apple - and make no mistake, they're building the exact same product, they just pathologically avoid talking about prototypes)
It's boiling the frog. Unthinkable, until everybody is doing it and it's normal.
The number of people buying Apple devices for privacy suggests that quite a few people do not trust them, and while the rumors have flown around for years they’ve never been confirmed. That’s a contrast with, say, smart TV content recognition so it seems unlikely that Android phones are secretly monitoring what you say without anyone noticing the data being transmitted or the battery drain.
> so it seems unlikely that Android phones are secretly monitoring what you say without anyone noticing the data being transmitted or the battery drain.
Ah! So that’s why Androids always have bigger batteries than iPhones. ;)
I get the joke but it actually works the other way: since Android devices had a 2-5 year lag behind Apple for CPU performance it would be harder to hide some hypothetical always-on analysis, especially on the cheaper and slower devices where most of the global growth had been.
The conspiracy theories of phones listening is not true.
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.
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.
I asked someone who had done high level work at TikTok what he thought of the CCP conspiracy theories driving the Trump/Biden ban pushes. He said something to the effect of "ByteDance isn't coordinated enough to pull off being that evil."
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.
What does your contact at ByteDance think the CCP staff does in the ByteDance offices all day? Why does the CCP need a board seat?
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.
I thought I would bother me with meta, but it doesn't really. I leave my sex toys out and I really just don't care if it sees them :P
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.
I genuinely don't think this will ever be useful. UIs based on voice and gesture are not precise enough Even if they capture words accurately, it's just not as expressive or precise as tap or click. Most people don't want to talk to their devices out loud in public. There's precious few use cases where I want data to be in front of what I'm trying to look at. We've been trying for so very long and nothing has stuck. The last coup in AR was Pokemon Go. We've had a Meta Quest for years and it's primary use is still Beat Saber. It just isn't going to happen.
I kinda doubt that. I think Apple is on the wrong track there. Maybe for now it makes sense but I don't think it will stay as the tech improves. It's pretty annoying having to look at everything you interact with. It's unnatural. Also, typing by looking at each individual key will be exhausting and slow.
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.
> We've had a Meta Quest for years and it's primary use is still Beat Saber. It just isn't going to happen.
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.
Is it going to be open like Android or closed like Google Play? They seem to be evasive about licensing
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
I suspect we agree, but to try to steelman here there is a signficant and increasing need for hardware to support on-device AI, and anytime you're talking hardware there has to be a baseline level of support in the OS.
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.
I'd bet a lot of money it's not running anything significant on device AI-wise, maybe a speech model, but not anything in the key assistant pipeline that wasn't there in 2020.
It has essentially nothing to do with AI, they seem to have thrown that in for bonus PR points. Sure, ML is plenty involved behind the scenes for both actual use cases (AR and VR) but it's not relevant and not what people think of when they read AI.
Reading the dev blog or the actual documentation was more informative to me:
Alternatively, maybe Alphabet actually came to understand that while it would have been a pointless waste of time to flush money away on AR and VR in the manner of Apple and Meta, AI use cases and work on stuff like like Gemini streaming and Project Astra (both prominently highlighted yesterday) convinced them that AR might actually have some general use in the future.
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.
It just feels a closed collaboration between Samsung and Google at this time. And there is too much unknown.
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.
Right, most probably closed-source just like Android wear. Even manufacturers may not have access to the source code, they would just put their stuff in the vendor partition.
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.
I wonder how society is going to adapt to everyone literally having a camera pointed at them all the time by the people they interact with. You can say 'there are cameras everywhere' or 'cameras are on phones', but it is different when the camera is on someone's face that you are talking to. Imagine every social interaction being on video, or at least not knowing if it is. We will have to adapt to that, probably by being overly cautious about what we say and do.
I wonder how society is going to adapt to everyone literally having a camera pointed at them all the time by the people they interact with.
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.
- 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.
… and did a massive pivot to copy the iPhone when that launched in 2007. It made sense from the perspective of protecting search but let’s be honest about the real motivation.
I'd hope for Meta to support these new Jetpack APIs for the Quest / horizonOS, as their SDK is currently basically limited to Unity / Unreal / Native, with no primitives for building regular apps.
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
I'd bet on Meta because XR is Zuckerberg's Moby Dick whereas it is 20% of a 20% priority at GOOG. Meta is watching competitors (Vision Pro) but also keeping an eye on cost conscious consumers. It's so refreshing to see "Big Tech" taking such a pragmatic approach.
If any Android interoperability happens, I doubt it will be because Google is encouraging or allowing it.
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.
That's going to be complicated for no particularly good reason. It will turn out kind of like Android in Kindle Fire devices: No Play Store, but some app compatibility. Google won't drop their compatibility requirements, and Meta won't give up their own development path for an AOSP based product.
I can understand the camera feeds not being accessible to every app. Tbh that makes total sense. Do you trust every app developer to look around in your home? I would trust random app builders even less that I do meta :) I don't even care that much personally but I'm sure many people will.
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.
I can't see that happening at all. The idea gives little utility over the top of the last big leap (smart phones) with a lot of additional costs and problems.
The vast majority of people in the world don't own any VR device as of today, and likely never will. I don't see there is a "be forced to" thing happening.
They inferred it because those companies were left out of your category of the "last thing you'd want". Anything left out would be categorized as "not the last thing you'd want" when there are parallels in the omitted yet well known offerings.
You don't have to make a statement about ranking them when you said "the last thing you'd want". Figure of speech or not. It seems telling to the reader when discussing XR to leave them out, that's all. You could have just clarified and called it a day.
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.
My initial point was a really that there are terrible privacy implications and poor track record of actually treating the customer well, as if that wasn't obvious.
As for the rest, I'm just pissed off with people throwing their words into my mouth. Oh there we go again.
The market already answered for the time being: none of them. This is space is an R&D sinkhole, all what companies do is make land grabs for an imagined future.
Recently I realized that what I want out of a personal computer is a Unix terminal. And that’s actually pretty weird and far from how most people use a computer.
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.
Everyone does. This is another step towards that. The top comment says Google has been stop-and-go about this. Well the tech was never there to do it. But they never really stopped playing with the idea. Since 2013.
This is cool, but I'm mostly sad the future of computing is so closed. I can already see that you're not going to be allowed to do a lot of things on these devices to the point that they're useless, like iPhones.
Google's announcements around these things always scare me. So many references to Google Play and their own services, its hard to tell if this will be open like Android itself or some locked down appliance like the Vision Pro. Its no surprise Apple chose to follow the iPhone model since it's so profitable for them, I'm not sure Google has the same incentives so maybe they wont copy that part.
It seems like even Android being "open" these days is an incomplete story, as it's almost more like a barebones Linux kernel build with some bare UI and libraries now, rather than a mobile OS distribution with standard apps that vendors can build on.
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 largely agree, especially when focused on consumer devices. Professionally I'm building a product built on top of AOSP, and it's been really nice to have a standard target and all the tooling that Android brings. It could be better but the base AOSP does have a lot of value as a general purpose OS.
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.
you can blame the FTC for that, google is getting antitrusted because they built android as an open ecosystem and then tried to monopolize it, whereas apple gets mostly free reign over their walled garden. it reads to me that the message from the FTC is to vertically integrate and wall off everything, and open nothing.
That’s a weird way to say the FTC is being consistent. Google marketed Android as open but didn’t mean it, while Apple never promised otherwise. While I’d like both to be more open, there seems to be a clear message that you need to give consumers what you sold them.
I am guilty of not seeing the point of the internet when it first came about, so I fully expect I'm wrong again. But I don't get these wearables beyond games, and potentially in the context of museums. I certainly don't think I'll be using these things.
Never even considered that. How does it work? I don't exercise with earphones or a phone because I don't like things on my head/ears while exercising. I don't like wearing jewelry, even watches. I'm aware this is fairly unique.
There's a game called beat saber where you have to swing light swords at blocks that fly towards/past you in sync with music. It will get you sweating pretty fast while having fun and not noticing how hard you're exerting yourself.
> I use my Quest almost daily for exercise. It's a game changer in that regard.
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.
So, for the VR stuff it's unclear, though I think everyone is underrating just how good the social aspect is - being able to have a "face to face" conversation with your friend who lives across the country is incredible (it's nothing like a video call, the 3rd dimension really tricks your brain)
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.
With the iPhone XR being an existing namesake and "Android" being first understood to many as a type of phone, I don't think this was a good naming convention idea for a completely different category of product.
I don't think most consumers are familiar with the iPhone XR. They know iPhone, and maybe iPhone X, but I don't think the naming will be an issue here.
My first impression was that they're bringing back something similar to Cardboard/Daydream. Agree that the naming is confusing on several levels, whether you're familiar with XR as nomenclature for VR/AR or not.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadhttps://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
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/11364102418590280
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/113641024185902808
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.
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.
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 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)
Highly disagree. The iPad line is very strong, especially in the artist community.
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.
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.
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...
https://developer.android.com/develop/xr
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
https://github.com/meta-quest/Meta-Spatial-SDK-Samples
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/3HqLMma.png
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.