Google’s Big VR Announcement

It was an amazing day today at Google I/O. For months people had speculated on a big product launch and one of the most anticipated products was a hardware launch by the search giant squarely targeting VR. Google’s big surprise? The lack of a new virtual reality headset. So what happened?

Google has come a long way when it comes to launching new products and surely one of its biggest lessons was learned with the failed launch of Google Glass. Initially seen as a game changing technology, it quickly ran into PR difficulties with people complaining about being filmed, its geeky look and much more to the point of Glass wearers being labelled ‘Glassholes’. It was a big setback and one which sent the product back to the drawing board where it has remained hidden ever since.

Most likely Google learned a lot from the experience. Despite the Mountain View behemoth already knowing a lot about developing products and services, it became clear it could do better in its future product launches – hence the lack of VR headsets at Google I/O. Google has learned that it needs to more to gauge the public’s reception of its ideas before it launches major, new hardware. So what we saw today, was the company learning from the past; the DayDream platform for VR is their tentative first serious step beyond Google Cardboard.

What the search engine giant has done is taken another low risk step into the virtual reality world. Instead of developing a new product, Google will use its DayDream platform to get a much better understanding of how people use VR and the direction people want to take the technology. It can leave the difficult hardware work up to the phone manufacturers and once it understands really well the use scenarios (e.g. games, movies, virtual walk-throughs, etc) it can then release an amazing product to dominate that category. It is a smart and low risk innovation play by them. Whether the phone manufacturers are expecting this or not is another thing…

Since this is a blog on innovation and the benefit for Google seems clear, we’d like to know what does Google’s announcement mean for the next generation of VR innovations?

The New VR Innovation Agenda

First of all we now have a justification for manufacturers to develop the next generation of extremely powerful phones to run Google’s platform. It means 4K screens and high end mobile processors will become the norm for smartphones, especially those wanting to take advantage of virtual reality. This will be a massive boost to companies such as Samsung and LG which are desperately trying to justify why their phones should be more expensive and whose market has been undercut by cheaper phones running the Android operating system.

Secondly it offers VR developers a cheap platform to test new ideas and one which also has enormous reach. You can now develop VR products with the familiar Android SDK and launch your ideas to hundreds of millions of people straight away. This will be a serious innovation driver in the virtual reality industry, just like the initial app stores were for software developers. Virtual reality developers will now be able to iterate products quickly with the feedback of millions of people and find the most powerful applications possible.

As many have predicted 2016 will certainly be the year of virtual reality. It will be interesting to see now, what will Apple’s response be to Google’s effort at their 2016 WWDC?