Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset

> Devices will come and go, but the OS will be the core that stays and grows and evolves over time.

Say that to my Google Cardboard SDK programs, or the Google VR SDK ones, or Google Daydream ones.

You couldn't have chosen a worse topic on which to dump a generic "ranting about Google abandoning projects is low effort cheap shot", because Google does abandon VR projects (including OSes and APIs, not just devices) every 5 years, almost like clockwork. What I would call "a cheap shot" is to think that this new fancy "OS" will be any different. In fact, I pity the people who still consider jumping on this particular bus _again_.

Why on earth _did_ they abandon cardboard? It was really good for getting VR in the hands of.. well, everybody - and it worked quite well, too (for a bit of cardboard).

If they stuck to what they built originally they would be dominating this segment right now.

Which basically means they worked on it, failed, and kept trying. Glasses too.

People tried Cardboard once and stopped using it.

Cardboard was great, and except a lack of software there were no problems about it in my opinion. I remember playing flight simulator on google earth and thinking how much potential this had. I have a meta quest 2 now and it is still not clear to me whether it is really that much better than cardboard.

It's possible for sure that Google will abandon this and I absolutely recommend anybody considering buying in do so only on the value they can see and realise immediately, not on any future promise.

But none of that takes away from the intellectually interesting part of this : what is new here, what possibilities does it open up? What implications does it have?

The main reason it's less likely this gets abandoned is because the spotlight in the the AI race is quickly moving to how much contextual information you can pour in about the user's ambient environment so that AI can actually do or say something useful for the user. That pretty much means glasses, and glasses mean you need a spatial computing OS to drive the underpinnings that the whole thing can operate on. Right now the technology for true AR glasses is still 2+ years out so the temporary placeholder for all that functionality is these larger headsets. But line of sight to all the pieces falling into place is there, so all the players are effectively in a long game where they are building up their ecosystems to be ready for the main game when it does arrive.

Cardboard was what got me interested in the whole area so it had it's value. But I think for about 90% of people it had negative value because it presented such a poor experience to the general user. To this day I ask people if they'd like to try my VR headset and they will say "no I tried that already, I know what it's like". Most of the time they mean cardboard and it bears almost no resemblance to the modern day experience. But 10 years later the impression still sticks.

There's VR and then there's VR, Cardboard was limited to 3DoF head tracking with a single button for input, which is not even remotely comparable to what we think of as VR today. Full 6DoF for head and hands has been table stakes for a long time, that's what you need to make something like Beat Saber or HL:Alyx work.

I got my wife of all people to try a demo app on the MQ3 where cracks appear in your walls and your room gets invaded by aliens and you have to shoot them with the bop gun. She liked it.

But no way am I going to get her to sit through a cat simulator or Asgard's Wrath 2. She didn't like Beat Saber at all.

I think the lack of software that really took advantage of the possibilities and cared about the limitations — that wasn't simply a normal smartphone app with a bad UX because the display was now on your face — is the main reason Cardboard disappeared.

It's like: imagine if you just run the original DOOM in DOSBox on a phone and try to play it with the on-screen keyboard — that will obviously suck. Less obviously, even something as simple as going from a NES controller to an XBox controller can radically change experiences. You have to really consider what the right way is to use a system, and instead of doing that a lot of companies clearly go for existing zeitgeist in design language. (From memory as I heard it well before GenAI, real UX experts react to such UI designs in much the same way that artists react to Stable Diffusion).

Same goes for most VR stuff: There's some good games, but selling it as that means headsets have to be priced as consoles. That excludes the Android XR, and absolutely excludes the Apple Vision Pro.

> The main reason it's less likely this gets abandoned is because the spotlight in the AI race [...]

So we're assuming that it won't get killed in 5 years because it's nicely tied to the current bubble ?

I hear you, but I wouldn't put the blame on Cardboard.

The reason these people haven't tried anything else since Cardboard is because VR is still clumsy, expensive, of limited use and/or vomit inducing. I say that as my headset is still in active use after 5 years of owning it. In many respects I think nothing better than Cardboard has yet came out at this point for the ultra casual user.

Otherwise people were willing to give the Vision Pro a try because it was launched with much fanfare with a huge press focus, and I'd expect the Meta glasses to also have interest from people getting to try it.

These kind of big mainstream targeted events need to happen more often and stick in the news for people's perception of XR to move on.

Cardboard and Project Tango. They had the Quest - both low-end and high-end - before even Facebook did, let alone Apple, and ceded it for no reason. In fact, they canceled Tango FOR Cardboard, meaning that, instead of the world knowing Google for having the most advanced XR platform, they were known for having the cheapest one (albeit also the most accessible).