by Jason Snell
Inside Google’s Plan to Rule the VR World
Here’s Philip Michaels at Tom’s Guide:
Google’s working with a number of phone makers to create Daydream-ready devices: In the opening keynote, Bavor specifically mentioned Samsung, HTC, LG, Huawei, ZTE, Asus and Alcatel. Those phones are going to sport some pretty powerful specs to cut latency to less than 20 milliseconds — a key to delivering the kind of “you are there” experience Google is aiming for with Daydream.
Smartphone-based implementations of VR are never going to be able to compete with the kind of power that you see in the base system requirements for something like Oculus Rift—requirements so strict that no Macs support it. But if we’ve learned anything from the rise of the smartphone, it’s probably that they don’t have to compete. High-end VR rigs will probably appeal to the same people who have gaming consoles and gaming PCs. A mainstream use of VR is far more likely, it seems to me, to come from the smartphone market.
That said, smartphone-based VR tech still needs to be good enough for people to accept it. If it’s a lousy experience, it will fail. It’ll be interesting to see how Daydream plays out.