Google made the announcement on its blog. There, the company writes:
“We’ve been investing in XR for more than a decade, and just last month introduced the Android XR platform with our strategic industry partners. Today we signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google, which is subject to customary closing conditions. They are an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”
I have a complicated opinion of HTC since the vive was effectively replaced by the index when Valve created their own hardware.
On one hand I feel like the vive opened a lot of accessibility to a lot of people to try VR for the first time when steam adopted it as their primary hardware.
However the vive also had it’s own janky shovelware marketplace and when the index became first party hardware I didn’t look back.
A lot of VR games stopped supporting the vive but didn’t bother to update compatability to the index, effectively making them unplayable for me without extensive workarounds (doom VR stands out to me as a game I actually enjoyed but couldn’t play natively anymore when I switched and it didn’t seem like they ever updated it, open to be corrected.)
Like the oculus, I feel like the vive played it’s part in growing the VR audience but I don’t feel any loss as things move forward.
So thank you, HTC for making VR more accessible but you’re still seem to just be a corporation uninterested in making a quality product and more about making as much money as possible at the expense of everyone.
I don’t have any faith this pairing will make anything useful, Google Glass failed, Google cardboard failed, and pairings like Rift with Meta only exacerbated locking people into it’s Facebook ecosystem.
I’ll be happy if I’m wrong but I care a lot about this tech and feel like I can see where this is going.
I think it’s a bit unfortunate wording which makes it sound like the Vive was developed by HTC and Valve just adopted it. Valve did a lot of VR research, produced several headset prototypes, and invented key technologies like the Lighthouse tracking in the years before they announced their partnership with HTC. I’m sure HTC contributed regarding turning a prototype into a consumer product and mass producing it, but I think Valve could just as well have taken their VR tech to Samsung, Lenovo, or someone else and have them produce the Vive if they had been interested.
I wasnt aware of this, I was just speaking from my consumer perspective. That’s really interesting to know, thank you!