TL;DR Google is a partner in the HTC/Valve deal, a Valve/Google/HTC cooperation makes a lot of sense to keep Oculus/Facebook/Samsung from dominating a future VR platform.
We know that Oculus and Facebook consider VR to be a new platform, the Rift is a necessary part, but the vision is much larger. With the Samsung Gear VR and the (closed) Oculus store the first extension of the Oculus VR platform beyond Oculus hardware is already on the market. The long term perspective of this can make neither Valve nor Google happy. Therefore an interesting aspects of the Valve/HTC HMD announcements was Google being listed among the partners, besides several game and movie studios. Unless all they do is provide a VR street view, this has to be about Cardboard SDK, with rather big consequences.
Facebook has become a direct threat to Google's business model, and despite multiple efforts like Orkut and Google+, Facebook now is a dominant player in online advertising. If VR is going to be as huge as many of us expect, Google is not going to let the platform slip through their fingers again. Valve is not as threatened in the short term, as Oculus will not be able to simply shut them out, but their position in the gaming market is based solely on the desktop market, while mobile gaming is growing like crazy and pretty much everybody assumes that at one point in the future mobile VR devices will be powerful enough to dominate.
Valve has a hardware and OS independent VR API sitting between e.g. the Oculus SDK and a game that can handle features like external sensors, calibration and other things, and a distribution platform for desktop games. Google has an operating system that drives most mobile VR applications, an SDK and Unity plugin to develop these applications, and a distribution platform to spread them. Google is also in the position to integrate VR optimizations into Android, similar to those Oculus made to the Samsung Note 4/S6 to reduce motion-to-photon latency.
Google partnering with Mattel to create the Cardboard SDK based View-Master VR viewer and Mattel announcing it will run on iOS and Windows Phone too already hints that Google plans to extend their VR platform beyond Android. Their current SDK handles some basic features like IPD settings, but many announced features like specifying HMD values like screen size or lens parameters still don't work. Improved plastic Cardboard versions with external, DK1 compatible IMUs are announced, but there is no standard SDK that supports them. Interestingly these are things the Steamworks VR API covers.
Now lets say Google and Valve join forces, who gains what? As their markets are strictly divided so far, they will not compete with each other. Google gets access to the most established source of VR games with years of experience in developing high end VR on desktop and a very solid stand with gamers and developers. Valve gets access to the dominant mobile VR operating system and can influence required changes to Android to improve mobile VR. There are already games available for their combined platforms, e.g. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome for Win/OSX/Linux with Rift support that also exists in an Android and Cardboard version. As easily targeting multiple platforms is something developers want, a combined Google/Valve VR platform could cover both desktop and mobile development, just like the Oculus Rift/Mobile SDK. The result would be more games to be sold on Steam or the Play store.
And now Valve has partnered with HTC, a major competitor in the mobile phone market to Samsung, who have partnered with Oculus/Facebook. It seems pretty likely that HTC isn't only looking at desktop VR, but also wants VR to drive sales for their phones. They need Valve to get the developers, Google to provide the operating system and VR specific optimizations. All this is a big win-win-win scenario for numerous parties that will not step onto each others toes and are all threatened in some way by Oculus-Facebook-Samsung. So possibly the Valve/HTC HMD is just a first, tiny detail of a much larger cooperation that we will hopefully learn about this week.
Submitted March 02, 2015 at 09:34AM by faduci http://ift.tt/1EGjgYc
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