Enlarge / This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Poor Google. The company is about to get lapped in the AR/VR space by Apple’s Vision Pro headset, despite dabbling in the AR/VR/XR space for over a decade now. A new report from Business Insider details how Google has fallen so far behind, telling the familiar modern-Google story of a rudderless company with constantly changing priorities and absentee leadership. The BI report describes employees who were “frustrated” at Google’s own lack of progress when the Vision Pro was unveiled and provides a glimpse of what Google’s current (again, constantly changing) plans for an AR product are.
Google’s wheel-spinning in AR and VR is up there with instant messaging and payment platforms as some of the worst-run projects at the company. Hardware projects Google Glass, Cardboard, Daydream, Tango, and Iris have all come and gone. Software projects like ARCore, a VR UI for Android, the painting app Tilt Brush, and several AR Google Maps features are all dead or haven’t gotten much traction. Acquisitions of companies North and Raxium haven’t produced any results. Google’s 12,000 layoffs this year have cut into some of these projects, and AR leadership has been rocky, too, with Google Head of AR/VR Clay Bavor leaving Google in February. A few months later, Google AR OS Senior Director of Engineering Mark Lucovsky quit the company due to “the recent changes in AR leadership and Google’s unstable commitment and vision,” and apparently this was part of a larger talent exodus.
The BI report details how Google’s latest dead project, Iris, “was beset by a constantly shifting strategy and lack of focus from senior leadership.” After “conversations with seven current and former employees close to Google’s AR efforts,” Business Insider quotes a few of those anonymous employees, with one saying, “Every six months there was a major pivot in the program.” At one point Google was working on a pair of custom silicon chips for the glasses’ display and compute power and then gave up on the idea of custom chips. That work was apparently near completion, with one person saying, “I think it’s weird when you convince yourselves you need to build custom silicon, and then you go and do that—and then flush it down the toilet.”
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