TL;DR
- Google’s at present working to meet up with Apple’s headset efforts by means of Android XR.
- Google Images already seems to be getting ready to help XR content material within the type of spatial video and pictures.
- It’s potential we might see this arrive within the type of a brand new Images XR app.
3D video has been round for many years, and over that prolonged lifespan it’s taken a whole lot of totally different varieties, from these early purple/blue anaglyph movies to immersive side-by-side movies you may view with a VR headset (or Google Cardboard again within the day). With the Imaginative and prescient Professional, Apple helps what it calls spatial video, that not simply shops depth data in a intelligent, space-saving approach, but in addition makes it simpler to do backwards compatibility with 2D screens.
An APK teardown helps predict options which will arrive on a service sooner or later primarily based on work-in-progress code. Nevertheless, it’s potential that such predicted options might not make it to a public launch.
Peeling again a number of layer on model 6.27 of Google Images for Android, we’ve recognized a pair new textual content strings that make reference to spatial (or, spatialized, we guess) media:
Code
Spatialized pictures and movies will seem right here
Nothing right here but That may recommend that Google might be getting ready a brand new tab for the app’s collections that options solely this type of 3D-enabled spatial video and pictures. With Android XR on the point of open the doorways on the necessity to eat this type of content material, it solely follows that Google would need to make a spot for it in Images.
Not less than, that’s how this might go down. Images, it’s possible you’ll acknowledge, makes use of the Android package deal title “com.google.android.apps.pictures” however we’ve additionally discovered reference to a at present unknown “com.google.android.apps.photosxr” app.
It’s totally potential this new XR version might share its codebase with the Images app we now have now, however we’d solely get the XR expertise and see all that spatial media when utilizing the XR model of the app on an Android XR gadget. Or it might be the case that the prevailing Images app is definitely planning to allow you to browse your library of spatial media even on conventional 2D units — proper now, it’s simply too early to say with any confidence, both approach.
Nonetheless, it’s cool to consider Images working to help an entire new class of media. 3D’s had a tough time catching on in any significant, lasting approach, however will the present XR push be sufficient to lastly make it stick? We certain expect to find out.
