Announced today at Google I/O 2016, VR team lead Clay Bavor revealed on stage that the company will be partnering with manufacturers to build Google-approved VR headsets based on an internally generated reference design. To boot, Google is also providing their new VR ecosystem with a handy Wiimote-style motion controller.
Netease Games have announced that they’re to bring a new action role playing title to Google’s newly announced Android VR ecosystem Daydream.
CCP have announced it’s to bring a new mobile VR title based in the EVE universe – Gunjack Next – to the newly announced Google Daydream Android VR platform.
Google’s newly announced ‘Daydream’ promises to raise the bar for virtual reality on Android compared to Cardboard. At I/O 2016, the company showed the first glimpse of Daydream in action.
Google may have shipped over 5 million Cardboard smartphone adapters, but it seems the company is significantly elevating their commitment to virtual reality with the announcement made today at Google I/O. Daydream, the newly revealed Android-powered VR platform, is poised to offer all of the standard Android smartphone trimmings.
Today Google announced the next major step in bringing virtual reality to Android. They’re calling it ‘Daydream’ and it’s the company’s label for high performance virtual reality. Soon, ‘Daydream Ready’ phones from leading manufacturers will enable these high quality experiences through Android.
At Google’s I/O event in San Francisco today, they’ve announced that in Android N, they’re including a complete platform and ecosystem built entirely for virtual reality. The platform is called ‘Daydream’.
Google’s annual developer and technology conference begins today, and for virtual reality fans there may be a few nice surprises in store, namely the much rumoured Android VR and Google’s escalation in the immersive technology sector.
Virtual reality is growing at an enormous pace, and while we live in a time where more than a million monthly Gear VR users actively consume VR content, and dedicated VR shops pop up in China—it’s no wonder that a megalithic film studio like Disney is getting involved with their latest foray into the world of virtual reality, Disney Movies VR, a SteamVR app that ties all of the company’s VR content into one place.
Google’s annual I/O conference kicks off tomorrow and we’re expecting VR to be a major part of the event. Here’s a look at everything we know and what we expect to see from Google’s virtual reality initiatives.
NVIDIA’s next generation virtual reality GPU will soon be here, and it’s all new. But how much more power is under the hood of the GTX 1080, the first graphics card based on the company’s new Pascal architecture? We pit the shiny new GPU against its older brother, the GTX 980 Ti to see how much more headroom the new card has for virtual reality experiences.
The graphics pipeline in NVIDIA’s new ‘Pascal’ GPUs has been rearchitected with features which can significantly enhance VR rendering performance. Here the company explains how Simultaneous Multi-projection and Lens Matched Shading work together to increase VR rendering efficiency.
At Oculus Connect 2015, SVVR’s Karl Krantz told me that he accidentally spent 12 straight hours in VR and only thought that 3 hours had passed. I then started hearing a lot more time dilation stories from Owlchemy Labs’ Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer as well as Fantastic Contraption’s Sarah Northway. These time perception underestimation anecdotes were both fascinating and really scary, and they found that some of the likely causes were achieving the ‘flow state’, having a deep sense of presence, and even the sense that ‘time flies when you’re having fun.’
Are you the sort of person that has a hard time installing surround sound stereo equipment, or building IKEA shelves? Well, HTC is now offering customers a premium installation service to take the hassle out of setting up the Vive, a process that can be intimidating for the uninitiated.
Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he’s now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that Google is putting more resources in supporting VR on the open web. I had a chance to catch up with Brandon at GDC to talk about all of the web technologies enabling web browsers to drive room-scale Vive experiences and WebGL exports from Unity & Unreal Engine. Some of the highlights include a new WebVR 1.0 draft spec, the Gamepad API, WebGL 2, and WebAssembly.
I expect that there will be more announcements about what Google is doing in VR next week at Google I/O. Google is definitely investing in the future of VR and the open web with Brandon now working on this full-time, as well as with their recent hiring of Josh Carpenter to the WebVR team.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
You can now walk in web pages with A-Frame + #WebVR! (scene by @EricaLayton) https://t.co/0AMaCdjFOi
— chris van wiemeersch (@cvanw) May 13, 2016
I'm joining Google VR to work on #webvr with @borismus and @Tojiro. VR is for everyone, & WebVR is going to help make it happen. Stay tuned!
— Josh Carpenter (@joshcarpenter) May 9, 2016
Now that @joshcarpenter is joining Google to work on WebVR it would be a good time to announce that I'm also working on WebVR full time now!
— Brandon Jones (@Tojiro) May 10, 2016
Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
