Google Offers a Peek Inside Daydream 2.0

If yous get out technology out of it, what Google is attempting to accomplish with its new Daydream virtual reality headset seems to violate the laws of physics. The new pattern will provide an experience comprable to what you'd expect from an HTC Vive or Rift, but without any the powerful PC and external sensors those headsets crave.

But Silicon Valley believes technology is the respond to many unsolvable issues, and Google offered more than details about the new Fantasize design's technological breakthroughs at its I/O developers briefing on Thursday. The silver bullet appears to be a combination of software and hardware innovations Google is calling "WorldSense."

"WorldSense eliminates one of the major differences between smartphone and desktop VR today," Google technology director Johnny Lee said on stage at I/O.

Based on innovations already developed for the Tango platform, WorldSense starts with two broad-angle cameras mounted to the headset that constantly scan the physical room, detecting objects and tracking their positions over time. Its data, along with that of additional position trackers and a depth sensor embedded in the headset, are and so sent to a mobile on-board processor with a delay of about 5 milliseconds.

The result is that the new Daydream headset will recognize your position in the existent world and feed information technology to the video game or other virtual reality app you're using almost instantaneously. Smartphone-based headsets like the current Daydream View or the Samsung Gear VR can't do that, and the Vive and Rift both require a connection to a dedicated external PC with a high-stop graphics menu to achieve it.

Since no one exterior of Google and its engineering science partners has actually experienced the new headset (they're coming later this year from HTC and Lenovo), the large unknown is whether or non moving all that processing to the headset will outcome in lower resolutions or other quality hits, similar a brusque battery life. Google didn't offering many details to assuage those concerns, merely it suggested that upcoming software improvements will heave efficiency.

Those improvements will culminate in version 2.0 of the Daydream platform, codenamed Euphrates, according to Manager of Fantasize Project Management Mike Jazayeri. Euphrates will be built into the upcoming Android O operating system, which has a new window manager and admission to the system user interface accessible from a standalone VR headset—no smartphone required.

It will likewise let game developers recreate scenes originally written for desktop PCs, simplifying them so that they tin can exist displayed in a VR headset with a fraction of the processing power required to display them on a computer. That innovation is called Seurat, after the French painter, and ways scenes that used to take an hour or more to render can be rendered in just milliseconds using a mobile GPU.

"Powerful hardware as well requires powerful software," Jazayeri said on phase at I/O. But both of those things require people to actually use them to be successful, and VR's limited appeal—it'southward mostly the realm of hardcore video gamers—is the obstacle that Google and everyone else is trying to move beyond.

Then Daydream two.0 will feature several improvements designed to whet mainstream appetites, including the ability to bandage what your headset is currently displaying to your TV via Google Chromecast and save screenshots to evidence all your non-VR friends what they're missing. And if y'all're not into gaming, you'll also presently be able to watch YouTube videos in virtual rooms with your Daydream headset-wearing friends.

Your motility, Facebook.