Google’s senior VP of hardware, Rick Osterloh, talked about sustainability on the stage last night at the Pixel event.
While it’s nice to see the company talking about making their products
green, it seems to be finding it hard to ‘sustain’ projects they start.
In its latest product killing, the search giant has slaughtered the Daydream VR. The company confirmed to VentureBeat the
Pixel 4 and the Pixel 4 XL don’t support the VR project. Notably, the
company didn’t include Daydream support in its budget Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL as well.
In a statement provided to VentureBeat, Google said over the time it noticed clear limitations of the smartphone VR platform for a long-term solution:
We saw a lot of potential in smartphone VR — being able to
use the smartphone you carry with you everywhere to power an immersive
on-the-go experience. But over time we noticed some clear limitations
constraining smartphone VR from being a viable long-term solution. Most
notably, asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose access
to the apps they use throughout the day causes immense friction.
There
also hasn’t been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped,
and we’ve seen decreasing usage over time of the Daydream View headset.
So while we are no longer selling Daydream View or supporting Daydream
on Pixel 4, the Daydream app and store will remain available for
existing users.
The company added that it’s focusing on AR experiences with Maps, Lens, and search.
Google launched the Daydream VR platform in May 2016 at its developer conference Google IO. Later in October, it released its first VR headset the Daydream View. While it partnered with hardware makers like Lenovo to produce standalone VR headsets under that project, it didn’t gain as much popularity as the company hoped for.
Another Google product bites the dust.
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