32 with 25 posters participating

• Kind of dream. It’s fabric!

• The fabric is tough enough for a headset, but it’s flexible.

• It makes downloading your phone a snap. Just slam it anywhere and close the flap.

• Moving the phone back and forth on nubs moves the image.

• Nub different contact point, different point of center of the image. You will never do this during normal use, but it was a cool demo.

• The pillow’s face bounces off the Velcro.

• The inside of the device is without cushion.

• Remote control. The front has a trackpad, an action button and a Home button.

• The back has a “G” logo and thawed holes.

• The store / platform interface is pretty easy to use, in VR or out.

• Google Street View is much more impressive in virtual reality.

• YouTube already has a wide range of 360 degree videos that work well in VR.

• Wonderglade is a collection of four extremely simple mini-games, suitable mainly for very young children.

• VR Karts is a swamp standard karts racer that gets tiring very fast.

• Mekorama’s simple block sliding puzzles are cute, but they don’t really get much out of VR.

Google’s big hardware event happened yesterday, which saw the announcement of the pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, socket Wi-Fi, socket Home Mini, and the new Pixel Buds. While the “Made Google 2019” event continues, Google has been quietly shutting down enough products that it might as well have held a mini “Killed Google 2019” event on the same day. Pour one for Google Daydream VR headset and Google camera clips.

Google Daydream now sleeps forever

Google initially experimented with phone VR with Google Cardboard, but Daydream View added key features like a head strap, a controller, and stuff that wasn’t literally garbage. Unlike cardboard, Daydream made it so that you actually want to stay in VR for more than 5 minutes. In 2017, even the second-generation daydream View headset was released.

The Daydream View, and it seems like Google’s VR phone ambitions in general, are dead. Not only is the Daydream View no longer for sale in Google’s Store, but the Pixel 4 isn’t compatible with Daydream headsets. Daydream support has mostly died in the Android ecosystem, too. Despite support from Samsung, LG, Motorola, Asus, and Huawei, Daydream support is no longer included on current flagships. Ironically, the Pixel 4’s 90Hz display would have offered one of the best phone VR experiences available, as a higher frame rate would have been significantly more comfortable than the 60Hz or 72Hz that most phone displays run at in VR mode. Oculus and Valve both recommend at least 90 frames per second for comfortable VR.

In a statement to Engadget, Google gave a posthumous about the project.

We saw great potential in vrbeing smartphone, able to use the smartphone you carry with you everywhere to make it download an immersive experience on the go. But over time, we’ve noticed some clear limitations limiting the VR smartphone from being a viable long-term solution. In particular, asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose access to the apps they use during the day causes huge friction.

There has also been no widespread consumer or developer adoption we had hoped for, and we have seen a decline in use over time of the daydream View Headset. So, as long as we no longer sell Daydream View or support Daydream on Pixel 4, the Daydream app and store will remain available to existing users.

We invest heavily in useful AR experiences like Google lens, AR walking navigation in maps, and AR in search that use a smartphone camera to bridge the digital and physical world, helping people do more with what they see and learn about the world around them.

With Google exiting the market, the VR-based phone is essentially dead. Samsung and Oculus throw support for Gear VR with new devices, too, choosing instead to focus on standalone headsets that basically take all those parts of the phone and make them a permanent part of the headset.

Google shutters Google clips

Google clips has been removed from the Google Store, marking the quiet death of one of Google’s more head-scratching product releases over the years. The clips was an action camera that … took a picture for you? It didn’t have a viewfinder you just set it somewhere and relied on “AI” to decide which moments were important enough to photograph. Did we mention it’s two hundred and fifty dollars? It was two hundred and fifty dollars.

Google Clips was just one of those schadenfreudian products that seem like a bad idea on paper, seemed like a bad idea when it was announced, was poorly reviewed and then flopped on the market. This is the definition of a DOA product that will not be missed.

Google often dips its toe into new markets, and while it’s easy to state that the company’s Juggernaut will dominate any new market it chooses to step into, more often than not, that’s just not the case. It is much more likely that a company either enters the market with an unpopular idea or simply loses interest in something that is popular but not popular enough for a company that is used to having billions rather than millions of users.

Google’s frequent product stops make any new Google product difficult to immediately jump behind when it’s unclear how committed the company is to any new project. The recent lack of trust in the Google brand is something that the company has had to deal with ovsem recently for Google Stadia, where many users and industry experts openly wonder how long Google will stick with it in the gaming arena.