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.

Google’s VR chief Clay Bavor said on stage at Google I/O 2016 today that major phone manufacturers are creating Daydream Ready Android phones to power the company’s high quality mobile VR experiences.

clay bavor daydream google vr

Google listed eight phone manufacturers which is says are working on Daydream Ready VR phones, noting that several of them would launch this fall:

  • Samsung
  • HTC
  • LG
  • Mi
  • Huawei
  • ZTE
  • Asus
  • Alcatel

Google says these Daydream Ready phones will have features like high resolution screens, high performance sensors, and displays with low response times. By all accounts, it seems that Daydream Ready VR phones will enable a new level of VR performance on Android, likely on par with Gear VR.

It’s particularly interesting to see Samsung at the front of Google’s list of Daydream Ready phone manufacturers. Samsung of course has their own Gear VR platform—made in partnership with Oculus—which easily leads in mobile VR performance. It’s unclear how the Daydream and Gear VR ecosystems will co-exist, but Samsung’s involvement in Daydream makes it seem like both companies are willing to play ball.

We expect to hear much more about exactly what specifications need to be met for an Android phone to be considered Daydream Ready at tomorrow’s VR session at Google I/O 2016. Stay tuned.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • I sure hope the underlying framework supports positional tracking for at least the headset. It would be wonderful if older apps would just magically work with a Tango phone or Lighthouse headset.

    Imagine if HTC could make a Lighthouse compatible phone holder that would give positional when at home, but would still be sleek enough to work outside the home without tracking.

    Perhaps Tango is a more optimal solution as it would work in many different places, if it is low enough on latency and won’t kill performance/battery, will be interesting to hear what they say tomorrow.

  • 144Hz

    I hope the phones have 4k screens.

  • DiGiCT Ltd

    Samsung will eventually go over to Daydream, the samsung gear is just a milestone in VR but the true future is embedded into the Core android OS.
    There is no need for oculus sdk, even though most of the samsung gear stuff is done by samsung itself, the oculus SDK was just needed for having a way of VR on the old android system.

    Im developing on HTC vive atm and using just the simple steamVR sdk, known as openvr. It works perfectly for what i need, it also claims to work with Rift but i did not test it.
    Oculus is too experienced to run a software platform for VR and have no OS themselves, that makes it easier to develop on android N in future as it makes Mobile VR more standardized.