from Hacker News

We're accelerating the Android XR platform with a new agreement with HTC

by ytch on 1/23/25, 9:11 AM with 69 comments

• by thecupisblue on 1/23/25, 10:54 AM

  Again?

  Seeing HTC do this makes me sad. They will get burnt by Google again.

  HTC was an amazing technological frontrunner for Android phones.

  The team got absorbed by Google.

  They had people working on VR/XR.

  That team got absorbed by Google too.

  Now, the VR team is getting absorbed again.

  Google tried this already - and failed. And as someone who held multiple workshops educating people to use Google's AR/VR tech, I see nothing but a barely-useful Android fork coming out of this that will be used for cheap VR/AR headsets.

  So to recap:

  - There was the AR (https://developers.google.com/ar)

  - There was the VR (https://developers.google.com/vr)

  - There was Google cardboard

  - There was Google Glass.

  All of these projects were:

  - Early to the market

  - Had a huge advantage over competition

  - Were (relatively) simple to build on/use

  All of these projects ended up abandoned as the responsible person probably got promoted and moved on, leaving them to die. Now, when the competition stepped up their game and is gaining some serious ground in the field (META) it's someone else's turn to get their big promotion by releasing a half-assed product that they will forget about in a year.

  In the end, all that this signals to me is to be bullish on Meta, as their VR play seems to be sticky enough to draw out the competitors.

• by firtoz on 1/23/25, 9:52 AM

  So.. Meta has Meta Horizon OS, which feels quite inaccessible to non-corpos AFAIK, and now we have Android XR. Is it more accessible? I was working with Razer back in the day (as a third party contributor, not part of the team) for Razer OSVR and that was very exciting. They shut that down though.

  So, what I'm asking is, could someone do the equivalent of the Open Source Laptop[1] but for XR?

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42797260

• by jillesvangurp on 1/23/25, 9:53 AM

  The announcement is a bit lacking in detail. What are they actually announcing here beyond doing something related to XR?

  I talked to some IOS developers recently doing an app with some AR features. They were doing things with lidar and indoor maps on the iphone. I asked them if they were working on an Android version as well (I have a pixel 6 phone) and they told me that they tried but that the Android APIs are a bit limited for the types of things they were trying to do. Also, there don't seem to be a lot of Android phones with lidar.

  It seems Google does have some catching up to do here.

• by tuyguntn on 1/23/25, 9:50 AM

  I got burned out multiple times by Google's product discontinuation (Tango, Stadia, Glass)

  Not going to jump into this anytime soon.

• by yu3zhou4 on 1/23/25, 11:10 AM

  I can’t wait for really good AR glasses that allow for reading text in any language and additional insights to the real world while preserving privacy and don’t look like a crap at the same time

• by aboardRat4 on 1/23/25, 10:06 AM

  Has anyone found any real use for VR?

  HL Alyx notwithstanding

• by DiabloD3 on 1/23/25, 9:20 AM

  Why, though?

  Nobody wants yet another state-sponsored corporate data gathering malware "product", especially if its promoting a product that's virtually already discontinued.