Seeing HTC do this makes me sad. They will get burnt by Google again.
HTC was an amazing technological frontrunner for Android phones.
The team got absorbed by Google.
They had people working on VR/XR.
That team got absorbed by Google too.
Now, the VR team is getting absorbed again.
Google tried this already - and failed. And as someone who held multiple workshops educating people to use Google's AR/VR tech, I see nothing but a barely-useful Android fork coming out of this that will be used for cheap VR/AR headsets.
So to recap:
- There was the AR (https://developers.google.com/ar)
- There was the VR (https://developers.google.com/vr)
- There was Google cardboard
- There was Google Glass.
All of these projects were:
- Early to the market
- Had a huge advantage over competition
- Were (relatively) simple to build on/use
All of these projects ended up abandoned as the responsible person probably got promoted and moved on, leaving them to die. Now, when the competition stepped up their game and is gaining some serious ground in the field (META) it's someone else's turn to get their big promotion by releasing a half-assed product that they will forget about in a year.
In the end, all that this signals to me is to be bullish on Meta, as their VR play seems to be sticky enough to draw out the competitors.
It's not like Apple is going to open their VR iOS software (whatever it's called) and Facebook won't just give them their Quest OS either. At the moment, their choices are "build a custom OS" or "continue using the existing Android OS". And to be honest, I doubt HTC will be able to pull off a new OS/Linux distro to run VR on either.
They seem to be trying to out-compete the 2019 Valve Index with several newer products that on paper add incrementally so many additional features that they've left the index in the dust, but they manage to keep flopping on the basics - comfort, FOV, speaker and microphone quality, and last I tried it (a couple years ago to be fair), their frame reprojection was warpy and stuttery compared to Index's very impressive reprojection, when the rendering FPS drops below the headset refresh rate.
If they could have just refined and polished the fundamentals, they could start eating the Index's lunch, and there's a large number of people still buying the Index. And valve would still benefit from that because most people will probably use steamVR. The steamVR market is not small, but it'll get even bigger when Valve release an Index 2, or someone else releases something that nails the basics and uses 5-year-newer tech.
Heck, Google Cardboard was a thing 10ish years ago, and it was incredible. If they instead made a ~$50, cheap-ish but comfortable headset, with lenses and a strap and slot for dropping in and securing a phone, so that users don't need to keep holding their phone on their face, we could have had everyday MR back then. Plus, now we have wide FOV cameras on the phones, which should enable usable gesture interaction with your hands in front of you, just not something as intense as the vision pro or controllerless quest 3 where there's 6 cameras looking everywhere to track your hands.
(OpenXR abstracts away some of this - but not enough)
The question isn't what OS will be dominant - the question is will Google manage to fumble this again and what will happen to the users, companies and developers that decided to rely on the ecosystem.
This kind of stuff, alongside the way Java updates languish, or the whole Kotlin vs Java discussions, or how nowadays most of those efforts are code samples dumped on Github with NDK only APIs, kind of made me lose interest.
They also some products for 5G O-RAN and VR deploy solutions. But can those keep a big company running?
They have partners via Samsung to make hardware already who is prepping to release a Vision Pro clone. HTC hardware is bulky and ugly, and more expensive for what you get compared to Meta’s products. Google would never release that as a consumer product.
So, what I'm asking is, could someone do the equivalent of the Open Source Laptop[1] but for XR?
What we are aiming for is a general compute puck + display glasses + added 6dof tracking.
In this video we tried the Nintendo Switch as the compute plus self tracked HTC Vive Ultimate trackers for the head tracking plus Viture Pro XR glasses: https://youtube.com/shorts/U4vhEPQw-Uo
The Nintendo Switch was more a "can we do it" rather than a "that's what we should do" but it shows the overall idea
Update: ah, the source code is not really open: > For full access to the Github repository please screenshot a receipt of your purchase along with your Github email and username and email it to ...
Also unsure if it's standalone or wired because it mentions it requires a launcher from Windows...
Still, cool.
I talked to some IOS developers recently doing an app with some AR features. They were doing things with lidar and indoor maps on the iphone. I asked them if they were working on an Android version as well (I have a pixel 6 phone) and they told me that they tried but that the Android APIs are a bit limited for the types of things they were trying to do. Also, there don't seem to be a lot of Android phones with lidar.
It seems Google does have some catching up to do here.
Google have paid HTC $250m in exchange for technology licensing and an unspecified number of staff. It's a deal that's vaguely reminiscent of the 2017 deal, which saw Google acquihire around 2,000 HTC staff who had been involved in hardware development on Pixel. Google have been working on their own XR hardware under Project Astra, but it's unclear if there's a firm plan to bring that to market.
The Visor is also coming out this year and the fan base believes they will eventually target Android XR (currently they target Spaces)
Not going to jump into this anytime soon.
HL Alyx notwithstanding
We're in Oil & Gas, Healthcare and Higher Ed amongst others and currently support Quest, HoloLens and Magic Leap.
We (and loads of competitors) are growing at a steady pace, the numbers probably wouldn't excite a VC associate, but there's more to life and business than that.
i think the hardware people should go all in, a develop a full body suit, may be even encase it in a shell which could suspend you (for free walking, turning etc), and make VR truly immersive. Could even use sonic/air pressure to produce haptic feedback on the body to simulate touch.
I'd also recommend checking out Sprint Vector if you have a decent PC for PCVR (via Steam Link) - I was fully drenched in sweat after a 30 min gameplay session. Gorilla Tag is also nice for workouts while being fun, no PC needed.
Headsets are too heavy. Compute and battery needs to be somewhere else.
AR is better than VR. Passthrough with overlay opens up lots of interesting opportunities for AI learning about mechanical tasks, and AI feedback about what you're doing.
I love boxing, but having proper sparrings multiple times a week is insanely hard on the body and recovery.
Putting on my Quest 3 lets me enjoy a boxing match or two without any damage to my body and need for recovery.
Profitable use? Not really. At least not at the scale that is really needed long-term...
Nobody wants yet another state-sponsored corporate data gathering malware "product", especially if its promoting a product that's virtually already discontinued.
They show a demo on the street. Every person on the street at any street in the world analysed on real time. Imagine the surveillance possibilities.
