Google announced that Blocks, the 3D asset creation tool released for VR in 2017, is following in the footsteps of Tilt Brush by going open source.
Google announced the news in a blogpost, noting that development of Open Blocks is following the example put forth by Open Brush, a version of Google’s Tilt Brush XR creation tool which was open sourced in 2021.
“We now wish to share the code behind Google Blocks, allowing for novel and rich experiences to emerge from the creativity and passion of open source contributors such as the Icosa Foundation,” Google says.
The Icosa Foundation is also known for developing Open Brush and Google Polygon replacement Icosa Gallery.
“Over the coming months, we’ll be working hard to bring the Open Blocks codebase up to modern standards,” Icosa Foundation says in a blogpost. “First up, we’ll be switching to use the OpenXR framework and new input system within Unity, enabling us to target Open Blocks for a much wider range of XR devices. At that point, we will be aiming to create a standalone XR port, and bring Open Blocks to the Quest and Pico platforms. Along the way, there will be plenty of opportunity to add immersive XR features such as MR passthrough.”
The team maintains its long-term roadmap will “transform Open Blocks into a full modelling suite, giving you more control over materials, adding texturing support, and enabling more powerful tools from traditional CSG pipelines.”
The open source archive of the Blocks code can be found on github. Additionally, versions of Google Blocks will remain available on both Steam and the Meta PC Store, although you should not the last time these have received an update was in 2018.
Google today announced it’s starting a pilot program that will soon allow select partners to create AR content and display it within Google Maps. While it seems like an important step for Google on the way to owning a piece of the ‘all-day AR glasses’ future, it’s unclear just where it’s all headed for the company in the near term. Because compared to Meta and Apple, Google still seems unable to commit to a coherent XR strategy.
Starting in Singapore and Paris later this year, Google is essentially elevating content built in its Geospatial Creator platform to the world stage, as it will soon allow select partners to publish their AR content connected to physical landmarks via Google Maps, which you can view through both Lens and Street View.
The hope, it seems, is it get mobile users engaged with AR content by searching for a location in Google Maps and holding your phone up at landmarks, shops, etc. Some of the examples seen in the video below include cultural and historical stuff, but also virtual billboards for private businesses, presenting something of a low poly Blade Runner vibe.
It’s a pretty neat showcase for tourist boards to get behind, and a cool Easter egg for Google Maps users too, but it’s difficult to imagine it will ever be more than that, at least on mobile devices.
While we use our phones for everything, mobile AR applications are neither as immersive as the promo video suggests, nor additive enough yet to really engage with for any meaningful amount of time before the glass rectangle goes back in your pocket or bag. That’s why so many companies are pinning their hopes on functional AR glasses for all-day use; it will remove that frictional boundary and put that AR layer much closer to the forefront to both users and the advertisers trying to reach them.
And as you’d imagine, there was little in the way of XR at Google’s I/O developer conference this year—unfortunately expected after the company canned its AR glasses Project Iris last summer, which also saw the resignations of top leadership, including AR & VR chief Clay Bavor, and head of XR operating systems Mark Lucovsky.
At the time, Lucovsky maintained in an X post his departure was heavily influenced by “changes in AR leadership and Google’s unstable commitment and vision.”
That’s not to say Google isn’t doing XR stuff, but it all still feels like it’s following the company’s usual brand of scattershot Darwinism. We heard about more incremental updates to ARCore, its developer platform for building AR experiences which was initially released in 2017. We heard about how its light field video chatting tech Project Starline will soon become an actual product.
We also got a quick glimpse of a very Project Iris-style device in a video (seen below), which the company simply calls “a prototype glasses device.”
The demo was more about highlighting the company’s research in computer vision and AI assistants with Project Astra though, as there’s no word on what those glasses are beyond that description. Given what we saw, it appears the device is more like a pair of Google Glass-style smartglasses than AR glasses as such. Learn more about the difference here.
The short of it: smartglasses can do things like feed you AI assistant stuff, play music, and show you static information, i.e. not spatial data like 3D models that blend in naturally with the physical landscape. That would require significantly more compute, battery, and more powerful optics than those prototype glasses could hope to provide, which means no interactive maps or more immersive version of Pokémon Go either.
Most of all, we’re still waiting to hear about the Samsung+Google partnership that might bring a Vision Pro competitor from Samsung. Most importantly though, it will be Google’s next big stab at launching an Android-based XR operating system following its now defunct Daydream platform.
According to a report from The Information, Google and Meta held a meeting late last year wherein the two companies discussed the possibility of bringing Android XR to Meta headsets. While it’s said Meta rejected the partnership, which would potentially allow Quest headsets to run standard Android apps, Google is allegedly still open to the idea.
Quest already runs an open-source version of Android, although Meta’s headsets don’t have the sort of access to standard Android apps built for mobile devices like Apple Vision Pro does with content developed for iPhone, which boasts over 1.5 million iOS apps in addition to over 1,000 native Vision Pro native apps.
Such a deal would make Meta more competitive with Apple in the near-term by allowing users wider access to Android apps not built for XR, however it would require the company to give up a good deal of control over its platform.
The Information maintains a such a partnership may stop Meta from “own[ing] the next computational platform for AR, VR and mixed reality,” which would also involve Meta contributing to the development of Android XR instead of more directly controlling its platform like it does today.
And as with all things Android, Google has has more than just a potential Meta partnership in mind, as it’s expected the company wants Android XR to fill the same role for XR headsets as its mobile operating system does for smartphones. It needs external hardware partners to do this though, since the company has shuttered a number of recent XR hardware projects in addition to entirely giving up on Google Daydream platform in 2019.
To boot, Samsung announced early last year it was working with Qualcomm and Google on its own headset, which means we can expect some form of Android XR there first. Additionally, it was reported last summer that South Korean tech giant delayed the still unnamed XR headset to make it more competitive with Vision Pro.
Meanwhile, Meta has partnered with LG to ostensibly manufacture the next wave of Quest headsets, which reportedly could be both a high-end Quest Pro 2 as well as a cheaper headset.
Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio, announced it’s bringing the chart-topping VR games Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) to Apple Vision Pro.
The studio’s seminal ‘Simulator’ franchise has had its fair share of success over the years, with both garnering over a million downloads across all major VR headsets. As testament to its staying power, the studio’s successful job place parody Job Simulator regularly shows up in the top most popular VR game charts since its launch on the original HTC Vive in 2016, with both titles making for great beginner VR experiences since they largely focus on family-friendly, room-scale fun that anyone can easily pick up.
Owlchemy Labs says both games—Job Simulator priced at $20 and Vacation Simulator at $30—will include their respective free content updates when they launch on Vision Pro, which are slated to arrive “soon,” the studio says.
Both games were originally designed around VR motion controllers, which the $3,500 Vision Pro notably lacks, which has put many developers in a pickle as they either seek to adapt their existing VR titles to Apple’s controllerless XR platform, or create a new IP entirely.
That said, it’s safe to assume the studio has adapted both titles to use the headset’s hand-tracking capabilities, which will not only be interesting to see since they’re such object-oriented experiences, but also to watch whether other VR studios follow suit to cater to the new platform that deemphasizes immersive gaming in favor of casual content consumption and productivity apps.
Founded in 2010, and later acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022). We’re still waiting to see what the studio has in store from its GDC 2022 teaser, which promised to be it’s first-ever VR game built from the ground-up for hand-tracking, and first to feature multiplayer. Whatever the case, it’s clear the studio is continuing its mission to release its most popular VR games on every headset possible.
Google has reportedly shelved a multi-year project that sought to commercialize an AR headset, known as Project Iris.
According to Business Insider, Google shut down Project Iris earlier this year following mass restructuring, which included layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s head of AR and VR. The report, which hasn’t been substantiated by Google, cites “three people familiar with the matter.”
According to a report from The Vergeearlier this year that first mentioned Project Iris, around 300 people were purportedly working on the headset, which was said to expand by “hundreds more” as production ramped up.
At the time, the prototype was said to be a standalone, ski goggle-like headset providing onboard power, computing, and outward-facing cameras for world sensing capabilities—similar in description and function to headsets like HoloLens or Magic Leap. Project Iris was said to ship as early as 2024.
Two unnamed Google employees told Business Insider the company could actually resurrect Project Iris at some point, as teams experimenting with AR tech haven’t been completely disbanded. Still, it seems its Samsung XR headset partnership and AR software development has become the main focus.
Samsung Future, Daydream Past
With its own in-house hardware allegedly no longer in the picture, moving forward Google is set to focus on the software side of AR, which also includes an Android XR platform it could license to OEM partners. Google is now developing such a platform for Samsung’s upcoming XR headset announced in February, as well as an alleged “micro XR” platform for XR glasses, which is said to use a prototyping platform known internally as “Betty.”
Google is pretty well known for shelving projects all the time for a variety of reasons, so it’s not a big surprise that an expensive hardware project is getting iced during an economic downturn. It’s also possible the company saw the writing on the wall from its earlier VR hardware projects, which were early to the competition, but not persistent enough to stick around.
In 2016, the company’s Daydream VR platform was positioned to compete with Meta’s (then Facebook’s) own mobile VR offering, Samsung Gear VR. Headed by Bavor, the company looked to replicate Samsung/Meta’s strategy of certifying smartphones to work with a dedicated Daydream View headset shell and controller. Google certified a wide swath of smartphones to work on Daydream, including Pixel, LG, Asus, Huawei, and even a number of Gear VR-compatible Samsung phones.
And Google’s ambitions were, let’s say, very big. At its I/O 2016 unveiling, senior product manager Brahim Elbouchikhi said on stage that Google intended to capture “hundreds of millions of users using Daydream devices.” No modern VR headset platform has reached that number of users even today, with Meta likely leading with the sale of nearly 20 million Quest headsets between 2019 and early 2023.
Lenovo Mirage Solo | Photo by Road to VR
Despite big ambitions to own the space early on, Gear VR became the clear winner in the nascent mobile VR market. Undeterred, Google broadened its horizons in 2017 to open its Daydream platform to one of the first truly standalone VR headsets—or rather a single standalone headset—the Lenovo Mirage Solo standalone, which awkwardly mashed up 6DOF positional tracking with a single 3DOF controller. Lenovo Mirage Solo was a real head-scratcher, as its room-scale content was hobbled by a single remote-style controller, which critically wasn’t tracked in 3D space.
In the end, Google shuttered the entire Daydream platform in 2019 because it couldn’t attract enough developer support. On the outside, that makes it seem like Google lost the VR race entirely, but a majority of standalone headsets on the market today run on top of a modified version of Android. Granted, that standalone VR content revenue isn’t flowing into Google’s coffers since it doesn’t control the individual storefronts like it might with a VR version of Google Play.
But that could change with its new Samsung/Qualcomm partnership, representing a fresh opportunity for Google to finally stake a claim in the mounting mixed reality (MR) race.
MR Headsets Walk, AR Headsets Run
MR headsets are virtual reality headsets that use color passthrough cameras to offer up an augmented reality view, letting you do VR things like play games in a fully immersive environment in addition to using passthrough to shoot zombies in your living room, or watch a giant virtual TV in your real-life bathroom (for optimal user comfort).
It’s still early days for MR headsets. While devices like Meta Quest Pro ($1,000) and Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro ($3,500) are likely to appeal to prosumers and enterprise due to their high price points, there’s a mounting battle for consumer eyeballs too. Provided that still-under-wraps Samsung XR headset can land at a digestible price for consumers, its brand name cache and patented global reach may serve up strong competition to Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 MR headset, due in September at $500.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Price speculation aside, the companies that launch MR headsets today will be better positioned to launch all-day AR headsets in the future. Platform holders like Meta are using their MR headsets today as test beds to see what AR content consumers find most compelling. Apple will be doing just that when it launches Vision Pro in 2024 at arguably an even deeper level, as the Cupertino tech giant seems to be deemphasizing VR stuff entirely.
Whatever the case, Google’s decision to reportedly shelve Project Iris means it’ll be more reliant on OEMs in the near term, and its first volley with that Android-supported Samsung XR headset will reveal the size of its ambitions. It’s a strategy that could work out in its favor as it critically gauges when, if ever to resurrect its own Google-built AR glasses.
It’s been nearly two years since Google first introduced Project Starline, a telepresence platform designed to facilitate natural-feeling remote communication between two people. While we haven’t heard much about the project, the company recently confirmed it’s still ongoing, recently revealing a more compact and affordable system.
Project Starline was first revealed back at Google I/O 2021, with the goal of making it feel like you’re sitting in front of another person, even though they’re remote. Using a bevy of sensors, a light-field display, spatial audio, and novel compression, Google says it’s able to recreate a very immersive likeness of the person on the other end.
We haven’t heard too much about Project Starline in the intervening years, but last week at Google I/O 2023 we got a small update confirming the project is still ongoing and improving:
The update introduces the latest prototype which shrinks the system somewhat from a large booth to a more streamlined setup that appears to use commodity depth cameras and fewer of them. Google says that makes the latest prototype “more practical,” and says that select companies are trialing the new version.
“Our earlier Project Starline prototypes took up an entire room, requiring complex hardware such as infrared light emitters and special cameras to create a live 3D model of the person you were talking to. While the results were impressive, the size and complexity of the system made it challenging to bring to many of today’s offices,” the company writes in an update on the project. “So for our latest prototype, we developed new AI techniques that only require a few standard cameras to produce higher quality, lifelike 3D images. Thanks to these advancements, our prototype now resembles a more traditional video conferencing system—going from the size of a restaurant booth to a flat-screen TV—that’s more deployable and accessible.”
Despite shrinking things down, Google confirms the system still uses a light-field display which creates a true 3D image without the need for glasses. However we still don’t know much about the specific display being used.
The entire premise behind Project Starline is that representing remote participants more realistically leads to better conversations. To that end the company recently pointed out several studies providing evidence that the system can bring “improved conversation dynamics, reduced video meeting fatigue, and increased attentiveness.”
Earlier this year, Google announced an upcoming AR game, Space Invaders: World Defense, which is built as a showcase of the company’s latest AR tool. Now you can jump in and shoot down some of the game’s iconic block-shaped aliens yourself.
Google and developer Taito have launched Space Invaders: World Defense, releasing both on Android and iOS devices. The game’s titular space invaders spawn from buildings and rooftops, hide behind structures and hover in the sky, so make sure to play outside.
The studios also tossed out a new launch video, embedded below this update.
Developer Taito has offered up a first real glimpse of Space Invaders: World Defense.
The game is now available for pre-registration on the Google Play Store (and “coming soon” to the Apple App Store), but still doesn’t offer too many details on exactly how the game will work beyond pointing and zapping floating enemies.
SPACE INVADERS have returned to conquer the world, this time from a different dimension. Join the World Defense team to find, and defeat SPACE INVADERS in your neighborhood. As a member of the elite pilot force, you’ll defend your area from invasion in a first-of-its-kind immersive game experience. Engage in missions across dimensions from Augmented Reality to the parallel Invader world. Success will earn you a spot on the High Scores as well as special bonuses and power ups.
To be fair, building compelling AR gameplay that happens through a phone screen is tough. But games like this will have the opportunity to really flourish as head-worn AR devices begin to proliferate.
The original article, which covers the initial announcement of the game, continues below.
Original Article (May 11th, 2023): Over the last few years Google has been steadily working on its AR developer toolset, ARCore. This week at Google IO 2023, the company added a brand new tool to its kit called Geospatial Creator.
Geospatial Creator gives developers the ability to create world-anchored digital content that will appear in the same location for all users. Built on a foundation of both ARCore and 3D data from Google Maps, it’s competes with Niantic’s Lightship AR platform, and is getting integrations for both Unity and Adobe Aero.
To showcase the latest capabilities of ARCore, Google has teamed up with Taito Corporation, the original developer of arcade hit Space Invaders (1978), to build a brand new city-scale AR game called Space Invaders: World Defense.
Planned to launch later this Summer—fittingly aligned with the 45 year anniversary of the original game—Space Invaders: World Defense will purportedly have players “defend the earth from Space Invaders in their neighborhood,” and will “combine AR and 3D gameplay to deliver a fully contextual and highly engaging immersive experience that connects multi-generations of players.”
Sadly we’ve yet to see a glimpse of any real gameplay, so it isn’t clear just how the game will work, but with any luck we’ll eventually find more information from the game’s official website.
Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, the company’s work-focused version of its iconic but once maligned smartglasses, is being discontinued.
Google says in a device support FAQ that, starting March 15th, it will no longer sell Glass Enterprise 2, adding that it will only support the device until September 15th, 2023.
While the company says it’s not pushing out any more software for Glass Enterprise Edition after that date, however its most recent system images will remain publicly available until at least April 1st, 2024.
Launched in 2017, Google Glass for enterprise was a revival of sorts, as the company had ceased production of the storied device in 2015.
Google Glass Explorer Edition | Image courtesy Alphabet
Starting in 2012, the company was hoping to seed the device among prosumers with its Glass Explorer Editions, although public backlash spawned the term “glasshole,” putting a severe dent in Google’s ambitions to launch a more consumer-focused version of the device.
Google hasn’t explained why it’s killing off Glass for enterprise. In response to PC Mag, a Google spokesperson left this comment:
“For years, we’ve been building AR into many Google products and we’ll continue to look at ways to bring new, innovative AR experiences across our product portfolio.”
To be fair, Google probably has bigger fish to fry, and the aging smartglasses platform may well be replaced sooner rather than later. Google said last summer it would be conducting real world tests of its early AR prototypes, emphasizing things like real-time translation and AR turn-by-turn navigation.
There’s also the issue of emerging competition. Apple’s upcoming mixed reality (MR) headset is rumored to arrive sometime in mid-2023, while Meta is prepping multiple generations of its MR Quest headsets.
Granted, these MR headsets probably won’t be the model workhorses, although many companies see MR headsets as a steppingstone in preparation for the sort of all-day AR glasses industry is hoping to commercialize in the near future.
– – — – –
To be clear, Google Glass is a style of smartglass(es) and not an AR device as such; Glass provides a single heads-up display (HUD) that doesn’t place digital imagery naturally in the user’s perceived environment, like with HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap 2, but rather flatly projects the sort of useful information you might also see on a smartwatch. You can learn more about the differences between AR headsets and smartglasses here.
