Hello there folks and this is the second day of Google’s super exciting I/O conference. Yesterday ranked pretty high in terms of the excitement quotient and judging by the way things have kicked off, day 2 is not going to be an exception. The event took off with Clay Bavor from Google taking the stage to talk about Tango, AR and VR.
First of all, the talk featured Tango — Google’s positional tacking tech which has been leveraged to develop the company’s indoor tracking technology VPS, launched yesterday. The tech can provide you with directions indoors and combined with AR, it can also create things which aren’t there. For instance, you can see what a particular piece of furniture looks inside your room even before you purchase it and so on.
The talk then moved on to Daydream, the company’s platform for mobile VR. Google said that a lot of new Daydream enabled devices would be coming this year including Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+, and devices from LG, Motorola and ASUS. It also talked about standalone devices from partners which would be making an appearance later in the year and will not require either a PC, or a smartphone. The talk then moved on to Daydream 2.0 and all it would be capable of doing.
You’ll be able to capture what you’re seeing, as well as cast your virtual world right onto the screen in your living room. And, soon, you’ll be able to watch YouTube videos in VR with other people and share the experience in the same virtual space.
Google also announced that it was working with developers so as to empower them to create great experiences for VR. Toward the same, the company is rolling out a set of new tools. Instant Preview for instance, will let developers make changes to their app or experience on a computer and see it reflected on the headset in a matter of seconds. This should serve to fast tack VR development.
Google also announced a new technology it has been developing called Seurat. The tech uses “clever tricks” to bring cinema level quality to desktop graphics. How? The company promised to share more details later in the year.
It uses some clever tricks to help you achieve desktop-level graphics or better with a mobile GPU. Seurat enabled ILMxLAB, the branch of Lucasfilm focused on pioneering next generation immersive experiences, to bring the cinema-quality world of Rogue One to a mobile VR headset.
Finally, the company announced that it would be releasing an experimental build of Chromium with an AR API coming soon.
We will have more detailed posts on all this, and more topics coming out soon. Stay tuned!
