Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio behind Job Simulator (2016), announced the game’s sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) just went platinum, having now topped over one million units sold.
The studio’s breakout title Job Simulatorwent platinum in early 2020, owing not only to its fun and approachable gameplay, but also for having been a launch title for HTC Vive, PSVR, and Oculus Touch in 2016.
A testament to the staying power of Job Simulator: it’s still on all major VR headsets, including new entrants such as Quest 3, PSVR 2, and Pico headsets. Since it initially went platinum in 2020, the studio says Job Simulator is now “multi-platinum”.
Building on that success, Vacation Simulator continues the original’s mad cap, object-oriented gameplay, this time letting players explore idyllic virtual destinations while taking on a variety of activities—of course viewed through the same distorted lens of a robot society in the future who have crudely reconstructed what the human-populated past must have looked like.
Founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy Labs is also behind the Emmy-nominated Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) and their latest VR title Cosmonious High (2022), which includes more of the object-oriented fun of both Job & Vacation Simulator, but also emphasizes realistic character behavior.
To celebrate the news of now having multiple platinum-selling games, Owlchemy Labs launched updates to both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High for Quest 3, bringing enhanced visuals, such as real-time shadows and increased frame rate of 90fps.
There are relatively few 2D Android apps available on the Quest Store, which seems odd since the Quest hardware runs a modified version of Android. According to Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Google simply isn’t interested in bringing the full Play Store of apps to Quest.
“There’s nothing preventing Android developers who have an APK running on Android phones today from bringing that into VR,” Bosworth said in a recent AMA via Instragram. “They just need to ship the APK to us, and maybe they need to do some light modification depending on how the control scheme would work, but not necessarily much after that.”
So much is clear when it comes to publishing the app directly to the Quest Store, which is the case for apps such as Peacock, Pluto TV, WhatsApp, and Instagram. But what about the millions of apps on Google’s official Play Store?
“We don’t have a way of automatically ingesting those [APKs],” Bosworth continues. “We would love for Google to bring their Play Store of apps to VR. We’ve asked them. They don’t want to do it, so it’s kind of up to the developers to do that.”
While Google’s Play Store is chock-full of useful, oftentimes free apps, what Bosworth doesn’t mention in his AMA are some of the complications that would naturally arise from having the Play Store on Quest. Not only could it open up a host of hypothetical issues with how revenue is split, but also how developers might choose to publish their apps.
For non-subscription-based apps, Google takes a 30% revenue cut from developers, while Meta does the same for both the Quest Store and App Lab. But why would Meta want Google sneaking away revenue, or vice versa? It seems doubtful that two such prominent digital storefronts could coexist on a single device.
There’s also the matter of the Samsung-Google-Qualcomm partnership we heard about earlier this year, which is set to bring an Android-powered XR headset to market, suggesting that Google hasn’t given up on headsets despite having completely shelved both its Daydream VR platform and AR glasses Project Iris.
Whatever the case, Quest headsets are fundamentally Android devices, so enterprising users can thankfully sideload APKs fairly easily via the ever-useful SideQuest software. Granted, the onus is on the user to source the APK in the first place, but with no other way to listen to Spotify while browsing the web without needing to tether to a computer, or using a Netflix app that’s actually updated, it’s thankfully feasible.
If you’re interested in giving it a go, check out our guide on How and Why to Sideload Games on Quest, which takes you step-by-step on the process of getting both 2D and VR-native apps on your Quest headset, but also (if it isn’t apparent by now) why you’d want to do it in the first place.
Google has reportedly shelved a multi-year project that sought to commercialize an AR headset, known as Project Iris. Provided the report is true, it appears Google will now need to rely on Samsung to compete with Meta and Apple in XR.
According to Business Insider, Google shut down Project Iris earlier this year following mass restructuring, which included layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s head of AR and VR. The report, which hasn’t been substantiated by Google, cites “three people familiar with the matter.”
According to a report from The Vergeearlier this year that first mentioned Project Iris, around 300 people were purportedly working on the headset, which was said to expand by “hundreds more” as production ramped up.
At the time, the prototype was said to be a standalone, ski goggle-like headset providing onboard power, computing, and outward-facing cameras for world sensing capabilities—similar in description and function to headsets like HoloLens or Magic Leap. Project Iris was said to ship as early as 2024.
Two unnamed Google employees told Business Insider the company could actually resurrect Project Iris at some point, as teams experimenting with AR tech haven’t been completely disbanded. Still, it seems its Samsung XR headset partnership and AR software development has become the main focus.
Samsung Future, Daydream Past
With its own in-house hardware allegedly no longer in the picture, moving forward Google is set to focus on the software side of AR, which also includes an Android XR platform it could license to OEM partners. Google is now developing such a platform for Samsung’s upcoming XR headset announced in February, as well as an alleged “micro XR” platform for XR glasses, which is said to use a prototyping platform known internally as “Betty.”
Google is pretty well known for shelving projects all the time for a variety of reasons, so it’s not a big surprise that an expensive hardware project is getting iced during an economic downturn. It’s also possible the company saw the writing on the wall from its earlier VR hardware projects, which were early to the competition, but not persistent enough to stick around.
In 2016, the company’s Daydream VR platform was positioned to compete with Meta’s (then Facebook’s) own mobile VR offering, Samsung Gear VR. Headed by Bavor, the company looked to replicate Samsung/Meta’s strategy of certifying smartphones to work with a dedicated Daydream View headset shell and controller. Google certified a wide swath of smartphones to work on Daydream, including Pixel, LG, Asus, Huawei, and even a number of Gear VR-compatible Samsung phones.
And Google’s ambitions were, let’s say, very big. At its I/O 2016 unveiling, senior product manager Brahim Elbouchikhi said on stage that Google intended to capture “hundreds of millions of users using Daydream devices.” No modern VR headset platform has reached that number of users even today, with Meta likely leading with the sale of nearly 20 million Quest headsets between 2019 and early 2023.
Lenovo Mirage Solo | Photo by Road to VR
Despite big ambitions to own the space early on, Gear VR became the clear winner in the nascent mobile VR market. Undeterred, Google broadened its horizons in 2017 to open its Daydream platform to one of the first truly standalone VR headsets—or rather a single standalone headset—the Lenovo Mirage Solo standalone, which awkwardly mashed up 6DOF positional tracking with a single 3DOF controller. Lenovo Mirage Solo was a real head-scratcher, as its room-scale content was hobbled by a single remote-style controller, which critically wasn’t tracked in 3D space.
In the end, Google shuttered the entire Daydream platform in 2019 because it couldn’t attract enough developer support. On the outside, that makes it seem like Google lost the VR race entirely, but a majority of standalone headsets on the market today run on top of a modified version of Android. Granted, that standalone VR content revenue isn’t flowing into Google’s coffers since it doesn’t control the individual storefronts like it might with a VR version of Google Play.
But that could change with its new Samsung/Qualcomm partnership, representing a fresh opportunity for Google to finally stake a claim in the mounting mixed reality (MR) race.
MR Headsets Walk, AR Headsets Run
MR headsets are virtual reality headsets that use color passthrough cameras to offer up an augmented reality view, letting you do VR things like play games in a fully immersive environment in addition to using passthrough to shoot zombies in your living room, or watch a giant virtual TV in your real-life bathroom (for optimal user comfort).
It’s still early days for MR headsets. While devices like Meta Quest Pro ($1,000) and Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro ($3,500) are likely to appeal to prosumers and enterprise due to their high price points, there’s a mounting battle for consumer eyeballs too. Provided that still-under-wraps Samsung XR headset can land at a digestible price for consumers, its brand name cache and patented global reach may serve up strong competition to Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 MR headset, due in September at $500.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Price speculation aside, the companies that launch MR headsets today will be better positioned to launch all-day AR headsets in the future. Platform holders like Meta are using their MR headsets today as test beds to see what AR content consumers find most compelling. Apple will be doing just that when it launches Vision Pro in 2024 at arguably an even deeper level, as the Cupertino tech giant seems to be deemphasizing VR stuff entirely.
Whatever the case, Google’s decision to reportedly shelve Project Iris means it’ll be more reliant on OEMs in the near term, and its first volley with that Android-supported Samsung XR headset will reveal the size of its ambitions. It’s a strategy that could work out in its favor as it critically gauges when, if ever to resurrect its own Google-built AR glasses. With Apple and Meta both staking serious claims though, it needs to solidify that strategy sooner rather than later.
Samsung’s 2023 Unpacked event was all about the company’s Galaxy S23 hardware, although at the end of its hour-long presentation the South Korean tech giant announced it was working with Qualcomm and Google to develop an XR device.
TM Roh, Samsung’s president and head of mobile experiences, didn’t reveal any more than what was said on stage, namely the existence of the partnership itself, however speaking to The Washington Post he announced the companies are “getting there,” and that the XR device was “not too far away.”
It’s not clear what sort of device it will be, since ‘XR’ essentially covers the entire gamut of immersive headsets, including augmented reality (e.g. HoloLens), virtual reality (e.g. Meta Quest 2), and mixed reality (e.g. Meta Quest Pro). Our best bet though is on a standalone MR headset, which uses passthrough cameras to layer computer-generated visuals on top of the user’s physical space, essentially replicating the experience you might have on a see-through AR display, albeit on a VR device.
As you’d imagine, Qualcomm is tasked with building the XR device’s chipset, while Samsung will manufacture the headset’s hardware. Software will be provided by Google; WaPo reports it will be running on “the unannounced version of the Android operating system meant specifically to power devices such as wearable displays.”
With the exception of Qualcomm, which not only produces XR-specific chipsets but also regularly shows of its own XR headset references, both Samsung and Google’s commitment to the project are kind of a long-awaited homecoming.
Samsung was one of the first truly massive tech companies to develop VR hardware. Starting in 2014, the company partnered with Meta (then Oculus) on the Samsung Gear VR platform, which paired the Galaxy Note 4 phone with a headset shell sporting an optimized intertidal Measurment unit (IMU). Samsung Gear VR was essentially the first high-quality 3DOF mobile VR experience offered to consumers, marking a stark departure from the sort VR experiences you could find on Google’s more open, but decidedly lower-quality Cardboard platform.
Notably, Samsung hasn’t released a VR product since the launch of the PC VR headset Odyssey+. Like seemingly all big tech firms these days, it appears to be working on AR glasses.
Smasung Odyssey+ | Image courtesy Samsung
Google, although reportedly also working on AR device, similarly shelved its VR ambitions when it discontinued its standalone Daydream platform in 2019, something which at the time was essentially the nail in the company’s Android VR coffin. Google previously worked with Lenovo in 2018 to produce its first and only standalone Daydream VR headset, the Lenovo Mirage Solo, which offered 6DOF room-scale tracking while providing only a single 3DOF clicker-style controller.
Since then, Google has only really been vocal about its experimental system for immersive video chatting, Project Starline, which lets people engage in face-to-face video chats without needing an AR or VR headset.
Typically, we’d say Mobile World Congress 2023 would be the next logical place to share more info about the XR hardware partnership. Samsung, Qualcomm and Google will all be present, so we may just learn more there when the week-long event kicks off in Barcelona, Spain on February 27th.
