I was a big fan of daydream and unlike Google's other cancellations, this really felt like self sabotage. I don't know why they spent so much R&D on this project and not actively promote or support it (outside of that one big conference)
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Google discontinuing Daydream (Platform & VR headsets), Pixel 4 won't support it at all.
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
I would love to see this thing deemed as a troll post in Stadia threads, because it is always, always take out of context and spreads a whole lot of FUD. Half of what's in there was rolled into something else and the rest was either closed because of lack of use or duplicated function (or rebranding). Nexus was not "killed" it was evolved into Pixel, for instance.
Killed by Google
Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.killedbygoogle.com
What's more insane to me: google had a range of extremely popular VR applications on the Rift and the Vive, things like Google Earth VR, Tiltbrush, and blocks. These 3 VR apps are still among the most popular VR apps on any platform. All 3 were basically the early positional tracking killer apps. All 3 can run on daydream.
They never released their own, internal, extremely popular VR apps to their own VR platform. Just insane how poorly they supported their own tech, even while supporting rival tech.
haha EXACTLY my thoughts
Google has never killed any experimental projects before this, right?
riiiight?! ;)
LOL! Amazing.Hey, let's talk about another feature of daydream that they never advertised that is honestly amazing: cardboard 6DOF support. Since Daydream natively does 6DOF positional tracking (if it's enabled on your device, which, in google's stupidity, they never did for most devices), and since it's backwards compatible with cardboard, they had an option in the developer's menu to turn any google cardboard, 3DOF app, into a full positionally tracked, 6DOF app:
It's hidden in a developer's menu, where you can enable all sorts of really insane tech in Daydream that was never publicly pushed. For example, Daydream can do unlimited, boundless tracking. This is disabled by default, as a safety procaution. In the dev menu, you can turn it off, and thus it'll turn off the boundry options, which turns Daydream into a full roomscale unit. Other neat shit in this dev menu: AR mode, pass through mode, HUD mode, app recording mode, broadcasting mode (i.e. mirror your daydream output to chromecast). This is where the "enable positional tracking in older cardboard apps" option is found.
To get to this menu, you literally have to enter a secret code on a random screen in the menu's setting. I can't remember the code off hand, but it's something like "highlight build version, then press down 4 times, then the button 4 times, then move up to android version, press the button 4 times, then press up, then down, and a new menu appears" or something like that.
Mind bogglingly stupid how google handled daydream.
Maybe all of this tech will resurface in some other project of theirs down the road.
The Albatross did that and did it very well four months ago.
I keep quoting this in different Stadia threads because it's a great post, but very few people bother to read it, and fewer still bother to actually think about it. It must be more satisfying to dogpile with moronic "hurr durr this is DOA; this is Google+ all over again; something something Google Reader" posts.
Well then, that shows my ignorance on the subject! I guess my question now is what does Google consider sucessful enough to consider supporting? If the API for Google's VR was that popular, what does a Google property have to do to maintain long-term support?
I'm pretty sure I remember that very thread, too! It's just irritating and drive-by when someone just comes by, drops the link and hops out like they are somehow a free thinker.
1. This is Google, the company that kills most of their products.
2. This was always the plan from the start, because standalone VR is meant to fully displace mobile VR.
3. Google are still working on VR software and long-term VR hardware going by their R&D and patents.
This is all really, really poor handwaving of what that document is saying. Expressing that some vestigial technology remains in subsequent technology is technically correct, but completely immaterial to consumers and developers, considering that nearly everything listed is a service, aka SAS. It's absolutely, 100% correct to point out that the entire developer ecosystems reliant on those services were killed.
This is like saying "Sega didn't kill the Sega Master System, the Z80 and original VDP are still there in the sega genesis!" or "Nintendo didn't kill the Wii, the entire Wii is present in the WiiU!" or "Microsoft didn't kill the original Xbox nor the 360, the Xbox One can play those games!" Which is like, ok, sure, but the economic environment -- the domain where consumers and developers interact -- is dead and no longer supported. A subsequent technology replicating the function, while abandoning the service, is the exact same thing as killing the service.
Google being Google. Don't buy games on their service.
This doesn't say anything about the state of VR, other than Google is not interested or does not believe in the category.
This doesn't say anything about the state of VR, other than Google is not interested or does not believe in the category.
I understand what you're saying and I guess I don't disagree with that specific example, but there's a huge difference between Google killing something like Inbox or Reader, products that did not command a whole lot of time or money and certainly did not require people to pay for them, and killing a service like Stadia where Google has spent YEARS building out the infrastructure at tremendous expense and requiring people to pay for it. I am not aware of any services Google has deprecated where users had spent money for content and then they lost that content as a result of the service being shuttered. That's the comparison people keep making and it doesn't hold up.
"I didn't spend money on this, so it doesn't count that it doesn't exist" is some silly justification. For one, developers on such projects oftenlose their jobs so there has always been a financial element. Further, it's proof that just because Google puts money into a project, doesn't mean they are committed to it.
But really, that post is nothing more than "This project that they explicitly financially supported at one point, then stopped financially supporting, doesn't count when talking about a list of products they once supported then stopped, because I didn't lose money."
There is also hypocrisy in someone coming in (not you) and openly campaigning for "off topic stadia posts to be bannable" in a topic NOT about stadia, where all of his posts have NOT been about the topic at hand.
And, regardless of that list in specific, the comparison to Daydream is very, very specifically a good comparison, because Daydream is a software platform that received a MAJOR software and hardware push at Google, affecting numerous divisions, that was supposed to be silently portable (i.e. you didn't need to buy specific daydream hardware, to be able to run daydream software) as a new development platform going forward. Stadia and Daydream are extremely comparable platforms and products.
Seeing Google Wave and Google Talk on that list hurts. Google Hangout is next on the chopping block which I still use regularly. Them folding Google Play Music into Youtube Music which will be folded into something else or dead in a few more years. What has Google actually kept around that isn't dead???
Their track record doesn't inspire confidence for Stadia. It might not be around in a couple more years.
Their track record doesn't inspire confidence for Stadia. It might not be around in a couple more years.
Daydream always seemed a little half assed content wise and mobile VR feels like it's on a downturn (though I don't have any data to support that off hand).
Fair enough. We will probably have to agree to disagree about this element insofar as Stadia as concerned, because it seems like all the posts about how Google kills services so frequently is couched in the fear that people are going to buy games and then just lose them if Google shuts it down. My posts have been an attempt to try to assuage those fears, I guess. I understand there are other impacts of those kinds of services being shut down, but it doesn't really pertain to the fear of losing content an end user has paid for.
That's precisely what happens in this instance with people's daydream apps if they upgrade their phone.
Not that I really agree with Fedrik, but to be fair Sony dropped Vita like a rock after 2013.
Even if say half of that list is out for the reasons you mentioned - it is still a huge amount of products killed off. I've certainly been attached to Google products in the past that have unceremoniously received the axe (Google Reader anyone else?). They are, as a company, notoriously averse to long term approaches. If it isn't an instant success, they seem to want nothing to do with it.
I think that information is vital to Stadia, to be perfectly honest. It's a risk you take with any product really, but *especially* from Google.
Reader is part of play and was rolled into that. At this point a lot of the old apps are part of either play or the general Google app.
I got a Daydream headset for free with my Pixel 1 a while ago. The novelty wore off pretty quickly.
This is like, one of the most direct comparisons you can make though. Daydream was a platform with paid apps. Apps which will now be unusable on new hardware going forward.
Phone VR is dead with standalone headsets like Oculus Go and Quest having arrived. Having a fixed & dedicated headset provides many technical advantages despite the BOM being about the same or less compared to a phone + VR add-on.
Except for the part where Stadia's input lag would've made VR unplayable.
Anyway, TBH I'd never heard of Daydream, which says a lot about Google's marketing of it. I'm surprised there are people out there who seriously think Stadia still has a chance, it's almost as bad as all those people who thought Ouya was going to be a thing.
It's quite a strange timing, considering Stadia. I guess it popped out because of some questions about it around the Pixel 4. I can't say I blame them for that one, VR loose its novelty quite fast, it needs a system seller, more popular than Beat Saber itself.
Magic Leap is called a developer's kit despite being commercially available, like the oculus rift dk1 was, and in the budding AR sphere it's probably the most popular product at the moment. But mainly because it's newer and cheaper than hololens, and hololens V2 isn't out yet. Hololens V2 sounds like a much more ambitious product.
Daydream was a stand alone VR headset:
In fact, this was released within days of Oculus Go. I really don't know why the topic title says "headset" in parenthesis. Daydream was NOT a headset. It was a platform. There were multiple daydream headsets. You could even make your own Daydream headset. What Daydream was, was a software platform. From the day the Daydream project was announced, they clarified that all-in-one headsets were their goal, and that phone integration was just the stepping stone.
That actually makes this much more depressing.
well, daydream specifically is an interesting situation to examine, because Daydream was the extension of this popularity. There seems to be a ton of confusion about what this actually is, and what this means, so let's go back and talk about google's VR platform.
Google was one of the first companies to launch a commercial VR platform way back around 2014. They called their platform cardboard, named after the type of VR headset you could make infamously out of cardboard to access their platform. Cardboard does not refer to a specific brand of cardboard headset, or any headset at all, actually. Cardboard is the platform, it is analogous to SteamVR, or the Oculus Rift SDK. It's a set of hardware standards, which exist because the API that powers their VR software needs that hardware to run. It is also the API itself, a programming language meant to interact with this standard hardware.
With cardboard, google took the ingenious approach of making the "standard hardware" the exact same "standard hardware" required by android. So every android device, period, was automatically also a cardboard device -- again, cardboard being their virtual reality platform. This is why things like this exist:
https://www.amazon.com/VR-Experience-Virtual-Reality-Viewer/dp/B000M0E91Y
All those "VR headsets" you see for like $20 at walmart or target or whatever, that run on your phone? Those all use cardboard, even the ones on iOS, because cardboard, their VR platform, also runs on iOS. Google didn't need to make a VR headset, all the magic was in the hardware that was your phone and their API, and the actual headset portion was nothing more than something to block your view into your phone and a few lenses to magnify the screen around you. This made cardboard explode in popularity, it was without a doubt, handsdown the most used VR platform even to this day. Even right now, if you add up all the sales of today's PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, and even Oculus Quest, they don't match the number of Cardboard headsets in people's hands.
So with all this momentum behind them, google announced a successor to cardboard. Basically, cardboard 2.0. They called it DayDream. DayDream is to Cardboard, what the Oculus Rift DK2 was to the Oculus Rift DK1. What a potential PSVR2 will be to the PSVR. So google saw it was massively popular, and iterated upon it.
Their iteration upon cardboard also meant a bump in specs. To do things like positional tracking, it needed to be able to run google's worldsense technology, which only specific android phones had as it wasn't part of the default, base android spec. This spec change meant that, unlike cardboard, Daydream only ran on a small subset of android devices, not the entire line. Now, back when this launched, google assured everyone that these advances would eventually roll into the standard android spec, that after a certain point, all android devices would have this tech built in, so daydream support would slowly become ubiquitous over time.
Problem is, once the launched Daydream, they basically dropped it immediately afterwards. The Daydream store itself is still exactly the same as it was when it launched. They stopped talking about it at conferences immediately after. They stopped advertising it. It was immediate. It was, really, to give a comparison, pretty much exactly like how Sony handled the PSVita. Google pretended Daydream didn't exist the moment it launched, despite it being a successor to an insanely popular and industry-leading product.
Now, in a bit of irony, Cardboard still runs on everything. And cardboard headsets are still made. That platform still has a lot of support, because the cost to use it is insanely cheap. I run a VR business, several years ago I did a project with a realtor company where we developed an app that would let people take virtual tours of homes on the market. We built post cards that the realtor could mail out, that would fold into a VR viewer, with a QR code that people could scan on their phone, to drop them directly into the house on the market. Each one cost like $0.50 to make. So cardboard remains popular.
It's really disappointing all around. Google's awful, awful support here killed a very promising platform.
And for the record, for those who came ITT to talk about stadia, I have been a huge supporter of Daydream since day 1. In fact: https://www.resetera.com/threads/le...one-vr-headset-competitor-to-oculus-go.40671/
Google not actively supporting their VR initiative was dumb, but I also think renaming their Cardboard app to Daydream was a bad move, as they already had a feature labeled "Daydream" on their phones (it was initially a screensaver like functionality as I recall).
Edit: Krejlooc made the giant post above before I could finish mine lol.
Edit: Krejlooc made the giant post above before I could finish mine lol.
The hottakes people are having regarding Stadia are so cringe worthy 🙄
Did People say the same after Vita/WIIU or kinda the Xbox One failed? That the company will now close up everything after a failed try? Google doesn't even have to risk much, because they aren't losing that mich money, that could even slightly bother them.
Not to mention that everything points to the Stadia being successful.
Did People say the same after Vita/WIIU or kinda the Xbox One failed? That the company will now close up everything after a failed try? Google doesn't even have to risk much, because they aren't losing that mich money, that could even slightly bother them.
Not to mention that everything points to the Stadia being successful.
sounds like every other google products not named android, search, drive, docs & maps.
Cardboard started out big, but it was a dust collector. Daydream View was a higher build quality dust collector. Mirage Solo was a super-expensive dust collector. Anyone interested enough to invest $1-400 on VR knew that Oculus and Sony offered better experiences at their respective pricepoints and were more committed to making consumers happy with software.
I had to do the googles.....I thought it was an old program or something it was launched in 2016. Sony let SOCOM servers run longer than that