Google has acquired a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million, something the company says will “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Google’s announcement of Android XR last month represents a critical shift in the competitive landscape, as Samsung will ostensibly be the first to launch a headset running Android XR. Excitement for familiar faces offering up competition in the consumer XR space was tempered somewhat by the usual questions surrounding Google’s ability to commit to the project long-term.

While Google has addressed some of those underlying concerns in a Road to VR exclusive, which you can read more about here, that doesn’t reduce the laundry list of products and services killed by the company over the years, one of which includes Google Daydream, the company’s first real attempt at entering the XR space proper back in 2016.

Google Daydream View (2017) | Image courtesy Google

Now, Google announced it’s signed an agreement with HTC to acquire a number of HTC’s XR engineers for $250 million. The details of the agreement are still thin, although it’s possible Google is tapping HTC for its hardware talent in a bid to secure a more solid foundation in the modern XR segment.

“We’ve been investing in XR for more than a decade, and just last month introduced the Android XR platform with our strategic industry partners,” Google says in the announcement. “Today we signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google, which is subject to customary closing conditions. They are an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time Google paid top dollar for HTC engineers. In 2017, the company shelled out a princely sum to gut HTC of its smartphone engineering talent, amounting to $1.1 billion. One year later, HTC merged its smartphone and VR divisions, which signaled HTC was putting increased emphasis on its XR ambitions.

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Since the details of the deal aren’t public, where that leaves HTC for now is still a mystery. The Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company is principally involved in producing XR headsets for enterprise and prosumers, such as its latest headset Vive Focus Vision, a $1,000 standalone mixed reality headset that packs in a mishmash of specs from Vive Focus 3 (2021) and Vive Elite XR (2023).

That said, HTC has dabbled with non-XR devices in the recent past, although very little to hang its hat on. In 2018, the company released HTC Exodus 1, the crypto-phone that seemed encouraging enough for the company to release its follow-up one year later. In 2019, it released an at-home 5G hub, which capitalized on the first wave of buzz surrounding 5G. None of those devices are currently being sold by HTC, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • guest

    "Investing in XR" for more than a decade means screwing-over developers multiple times for like they did with Glass, Tango, Daydream, and so forth. If they respected developers they would at least make Android XR reverse-compatible with previous apps created for those devices. Instead all they want to do is poach Unity and OpenXR developers from other platforms and then lock them into their app store!

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: HTC may switch to offer professional standalone HMDs based largely on Qualcomm's reference platform, with a focus on service; this would be possible with a smaller hardware team and probably more profitable; whether this also means replacing their Vive Wave platform with Android XR remains to be seen, but switching might provide them with some interesting options in the long run.

    My wild guess would be HTC orienting more towards professional HMDs with a focus on service. So far they created their own custom hardware targeting special niches, selling in much lower numbers at higher prices than Meta HMDs. Their latest Focus Vision is largely the same hardware as the 2021 Focus 3 targeting business users, which HTC explained as mostly due to changing the SoC requiring very expensive re-certification. The Focus Vision targets PCVR streaming where the XR2 Gen 1 SoC is still sufficient, so they limited hardware changes to add-ons like extra RAM, better cameras, integrated eye tracking, DP-in and hot-swappable batteries, none of which required a significant redesign, thereby keeping costs low.

    HTC going for rebranding a three year old HMD with add-ons as their latest HMD hints that developing new HMDs from scratch, esp. standalone ones, has become too expensive for them with the low number of unit sales. But as XR becomes more commoditized, there is a way out of this. We just saw a rush of HMD announcements from Shiftall, Pimax, Sony and Play for Dream, all using 3552*3840 microOLED display. Two of these use an XR2+ Gen 2, all target a price around USD 2000 (,with only Immersed's Visor targeting a lower price based on a very questionable business model).

    So instead of developing a new HMD from scratch, HTC can now create one largely based on Qualcomm's XR2+ reference platform with BOE's microOLEDs, even with a reduced team of engineers, and at lower cost than before. Their main selling point compared to the others would be their record of almost a decade of service in the professional VR market, where in many projects reliability (of service) is more important than features.

    Whether HTC will still (be able to) also sell to the enthusiasts market like with the Focus Vision, when other Horizon OS/AndroidXR licensees can also release high end HMDs with little effort, remains to be seen. The now Google engineers that previously worked on HTC's custom HMDs will probably benefit from Google's much larger resources, esp. if similar to their Nexus/Pixel phones, Google intends to offer their own HMDs as a demonstration platform for new Android(XR) features that other manufacturers haven't integrated yet.

    An interesting question is whether HTC would also switch to AndroidXR. HTC has its own Vive Wave VR platform based on Android AOSP that is very similar to Meta's Horizon, but launched much earlier in 2017 with 12 partners incl. Pico, and in 2020 extended with Qualcomm to bring Wave to all HMDs using their XR line of SoCs. The business model is the same as with AndroidXR or Horizon OS, the OS is free, but all software sales go to the platform owner. But Wave never gained a lot of traction, almost none outside of China except for HTC's own HMDs, so they might consider dropping it to further reduce development cost. Just like Viveport and their Viveport Infinity subscription offering way better value than Meta's Quest+, Wave will never become a large player, so using the resources somewhere else might make more sense.

    Before they entered VR, HTC was one of the most successful Android phone manufacturer, so maybe they'll now relaunch themselves again as a Google partner leveraging their professional VR experience. And maybe in a couple of years, when hardware prices have fallen enough, they'll even enter the consumer XR market again, competing directly with Meta based on AndroidXR and commodity hardware that takes the sting out of Meta's basically infinite development budget that HTC alone never had a chance to compete with.

    • XRC

      From talking with someone very familiar with the Taiwanese company, the development money went to Vive Focus (business) with the lenses and displays shoe horned into the older Vive Pro body to create Vive Pro 2 (niche PCVR) with mixed results. I tried using mine for a week before it went back to Amazon.

      perhaps abandoning PCVR would benefit their limited resources, as Vive Pro 2 was so poorly received it's not recommended as an option when buyers are looking at higher resolution PCVR headsets.

  • sfmike

    I don't trust Google to sustain VR/XR development if they don't get quick profits.

  • xyzs

    You can buy engineers?
    I hope they guys will see the color or the money transfer at least.

    PS: Are we talking about the same HTC company that is not able to do a single decent product, since Valve is not helping them anymore ?