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.
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.
Google is shaking things up with the reorganization of its AR/VR efforts, Project Starline, and Area 120 in-house incubator, dubbing the internal team ‘Google Labs’.
As first reported by TechCrunch, Google is shifting a few of its notable forward-looking projects into a single team and bringing them under the leadership of Google veteran Clay Bavor.
Before taking the reigns of Google Labs, Bavor led the company’s AR/VR team where he oversaw the 2016 launch of its Android-based Daydream VR platform. It was an ambitious undertaking, although it was subsequently abandoned in 2019 due to a disappointing reception to its slot-in smartphone efforts and poor market performance of its 6DOF Daydream headset, Lenovo Mirage Solo. The team also helped develop ARCore, the augmented software development kit that brought smartphone-based AR to millions of Android devices.
More recently, Bavor led Google’s Project Starline, an experimental light field display system that the company envisions as a “magic window” of sorts, allowing far-flung users to speak in a more natural way than video conferencing apps can provide—and all without the need of a headset or special glasses.
Both Project Starline and its AR/VR efforts have a shared lineage within the company, but it seems Google is adding an entrepreneurial flare to Labs with the inclusion of Area 120, the in-house tech incubator that has seen the successful launch of several startups including Threadit, Stack, Adlingo, Gamesnacks, Avera AI, and Orion WiFi.
An no, this doesn’t mean the company is reviving the 2000s-era Google Labs, which was used as a public testbed to demonstrate new projects like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Wave. An internal company memo obtained by TechCrunch states the reorganization is “focused on starting and growing new, forward-looking investment areas across the company.”
“Central to this org is a new team called Labs, focused on extrapolating technology trends and incubating a set of high-potential, long-term projects,” the memo said.
As a result, it appears Area 120 is being elevated with its incorporation into Labs. TechCrunch notes that the incubator was “three layers deep in terms of reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai — even though Pichai himself had to sign off on its every exit.”
Google hasn’t officially announced Labs, however the company tacitly confirmed it by acknowledging Bavor’s new title, calling it “an expanded role” that will focus on “long-term technology projects that are in direct support of our core products and businesses.”
Google’s Owlchemy Labs, the VR studio behind Job Simulator (2016), announced that its upcoming game Cosmonious High finally has a release date for launch on PC VR and Meta Quest 2.
Update (March 4th, 2022): Owlchemy Labs announced Cosmonious High is slated to launch on March 31st for Meta Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets.
Owlchemy Labs hasn’t said anything yet about PSVR availability, however there’s no doubt in our minds that the pioneering VR studio (also now owned by Google) has a PSVR 2 developer kit.
The studio also included a new gameplay trailer, which we’ve linked above and below the article:
Original Article (September 21st, 2021): Revealed today, Cosmonious High launches you into an alien high school where you unlock powers in order to fix up the place post-disaster, and meet a quirky cast of characters who attend classes with you along the way.
Characters are said to respond to natural gestures such as high fives and fist bumps, which feels a bit like a natural extension of what we saw in Vacation Simulator (2019), which brought more user-to-NPC interaction to the table by way of gestured interactions. Here it seems you’ll also be able to select emotes from a speech bubble.
Image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
And like Vacation Simulator, Owlchemy Labs is offering up another “biggest space” it’s ever built with Cosmonious High, making for “one big interactive playground for your powers,” the studio says.
“With Cosmonious High, we’re breaking all the bounds. Players can go anywhere, interact with any character they see, and use their powers to resolve—or cause—as much chaos as they want,” says Chelsea Howe, product director at Owlchemy Labs.
Owlchemy Labs CEO Devin Reimer says it’s all about “interaction, inclusivity, and accessibility. We continue to push the boundaries of VR and we cannot be more excited to launch our first new IP in five years.”
Cosmonious High is said to support SteamVR headsets and Oculus Quest, and will arrive at some point in Spring 2022. There’s still plenty more to learn, and we’ll have our eyes peeled as Owlchemy Labs continues the drip of info leading up to launch.
Google-owned Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind VR classics like Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator, has confirmed that it’s working on a new VR project after running quiet for much of the year.
Owlchemy Labs has been around since the early days of the modern VR era, with the studio’s first major title, Job Simulator, bundled as a launch title for the HTC Vive in 2016.
After being acquired by Google in 2017, the studio went on to release Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) and Vacation Simulator (2019), with most of the studio’s games being ported widely across VR platforms.
Since Vacation Simulator, and a few post-launch updates, Owlchemy has been pretty quiet about what might be next. Especially considering Google’s hasty retreat away from VR, it wasn’t necessarily clear that there even would be a ‘next’.
Luckily the lauded studio has affirmed that it’s alive and well and working on its next project, which the studio has confirmed to Road to VR is definitely a VR game.
“Owlchemy is working on a brand new game and we can’t wait to share details in the coming months!” the studio says. Owlchemy is currently hiring five new positions to support ongoing development.
It remains to be seen whether the studio will continue to build on the success of its Simulator franchise, or branch off into something new. It wouldn’t be surprising if they stick to what works; Owlchemy is one of the only studios to consistently have two titles among the 20 best rated Quest games, and has topped many charts over the years.
Hopefully it won’t be too long yet before we find out exactly what’s in development. The studio said fans can expect to here something concrete about its next game some time this year.
It offers VR artists a way to store their creations online, including environments and models built using Tilt Brush and its new open-source counterpart, Open Brush.
Icosa Gallery is the latest option for Tilt Brush creators, with the ability to upload GLTF and GLB files from Tilt Brush sketches and have them display and animate online in the same way as they would in Tilt Brush. There’s also plans for direct integration with Open Brush in the future, as well as support for the .tilt sketch files. It’s also possible to import all of your current Poly creations into Icosa Gallery before the service shuts down in a week’s time.
This week Google revealed Project Starline, a booth-sized experimental system for immersive video chatting, purportedly using a bevy of sensors, a light-field display, spatial audio, and novel compression to make the whole experience possible over the web.
This week during Google I/O, the company revealed an experimental immersive video chatting system it calls Project Starline. Functionally, it’s a large booth with a big screen which displays another person on the other end of the line at life-sized scale and volumetrically.
Image courtesy Google
The idea is to make the tech seamless enough that it really just looks like you’re seeing someone else sitting a few feet away from you. Though you might imagine the project was inspired by the pandemic, the company says the project has been “years in the making.”
Google isn’t talking much about the tech that makes it all work (the phrase “custom built hardware” has been thrown around), but we can infer what a system like this would require:
An immersive display, speakers, and microphone
Depth & RGB sensors capable of capturing roughly 180° of the subject
Algorithms to fuse the data from multiple sensors into a real-time 3D model of the subject
Google also says that novel data compression and streaming algorithms are an essential part of the system. The company claims that the raw data is “gigabits per second,” and that the compression cuts that down by a factor of 100. According to a preview of Project Starline by Wired, the networking is built atop WebRTC, a popular open-source project for adding real-time communication components to web applications.
As for the display, Google claims it has built a “breakthrough light-field display” for Project Starline. Indeed, from the footage provided, it’s a remarkably high resolution recreation; it isn’t perfect (you can see artifacts here and there), but it’s definitely impressive, especially for real-time.
Granted, it isn’t yet clear exactly how the display works, or whether it fits the genuine definition of a light-field display (which can support both vergence and accommodation), or if Google means something else, like a 3D display showing volumetric content based on eye-tracking input. Hopefully we’ll get more info eventually.
Once hint about how the display works comes from the Wired preview of Project Starline, in which reporter Lauren Goode notes that, “[…] some of the surreality faded each time I shifted in my seat. Move to the side just a few inches and the illusion of volume disappears. Suddenly you’re looking at a 2D version of your video chat partner again […].” This suggests the display has a relatively small eye-box (meaning the view is only correct if your eyes are inside a specific area), which is likely a result of the particular display tech being employed. One guess is that the tech is similar to the Looking Glass displays, but Google has traded eye-box size in favor of resolution.
Image courtesy Google
From the info Google has put out so far, the company indicates Project Starline is early and far from productization. But the company plans to continue experimenting with the system and says it will pilot the tech in select large enterprises later this year.
Google has removed all listings for Cardboard VR headsets, the last bastion of its early VR efforts, from the Google Store.
The Google Cardboard product page now redirects to the Google Store homepage and displays a message that “the page you are looking for is not available, you have been redirected.”
Both Google Cardboard and Daydream View were early efforts from Google to break into the smartphone VR space. In the same vein as Gear VR, these headsets allowed you to put a mobile phone into a headset shell and experience rudimentary 3DOF virtual reality. Cardboard was on the decidedly lower end of the scale given that, as the name suggests, the headset was made out of folded card.
A month later, Google announced that it would also be open-sourcing the software behind the Cardboard platform in the hopes that third-party developers could continue to support the platform. Previously, Google had also released manufacturing specifications for the cardboard headset with the same intention — so that third party manufacturers could produce their own units and encourage wide support.
Up until recently, Google continued to sell its official Cardboard headsets on the Google Store, likely just to get rid of leftover stock. However, with the listings now gone, Google has officially ended all support for hardware and software of its Daydream and Cardboard VR platforms.
Google announced it has stopped active development on Tilt Brush (2016), the company’s VR paint app. All is not lost though. As the team pivots to creating immersive AR experiences, Tilt Brush has officially gone open source, allowing anyone to modify or even clone the app in its entirety.
Fast forward a few months, and now Google is not only shutting down its 3D object platform Poly, which was announced in December, but it’s also stopping all active development on Tilt Brush. In retrospect, Tilt Brush co-creator Patrick Hackett departing Google earlier this month may have been writing on the wall that the VR paint app was on the chopping block.
In a bid to let Tilt Brush live on, the team has released an open source github repo of the app’s code, allowing others to use, distribute, and modify it for use in other projects. The team says in its build guide that while Tilt Brush is a Google trademark, developers are even free to clone it completely as long as they choose a different name.
Now that developers are free to browse, at least one previously planned feature on the to-do list has raised a few eyebrows in the community, namely the missing addition of multiplayer mode.
The team says in a Google blogpost that Tilt Brush will “always remain available in digital stores for users with supported VR headsets,” however the move to open source the app will allow “everyone to learn how we built the project, and [encourage] them to take it in directions that are near and dear to them.”
Originally created by indie studio Skillman & Hackett, it wasn’t long before the studio and its impressive 3D art app were snapped up by Google; a 2015 acquisition proceeded the app’s launch on HTC Vive a year later.
Although it eventually went on to launch on all major VR headsets, development noticeably slowed over the past two years, starting back in 2018 when Google was still enthusiastically pushing its Android-based Daydream VR platform.
Tilt Brush’s most recent feature update came in March 2020, which brought to the app a new Camera Path Panel, Sketchfab, and a beta version of Google Drive backup. The app has only had a few bugfixes since then despite releasing concurrently on PSVR.
We are a free open source Google Poly replacement, built by the community, for the community 
, Icosa is the perfect home for your magical VR worlds.
