TL; Dr
- Google’s at the moment working to meet up with Apple’s headset efforts by Android XR.
- Google Images already seems to be making ready to assist XR content material within the type of spatial video and pictures.
- It’s doable we may 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 numerous completely different varieties, from these early crimson/blue anaglyph movies to immersive side-by-side movies you would possibly 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 info in a intelligent, space-saving means, but additionally 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 doable that such predicted options could not make it to a public launch.
Peeling again a couple 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, spatializedwe guess) media:
Code
Spatialized pictures and movies will seem right here
Nothing right here but That will recommend that Google could possibly be making ready a brand new tab for the app’s collections that options solely this sort of 3D-enabled spatial video and pictures. With Android XR on the brink of open the doorways on the necessity to devour this sort of content material, it solely follows that Google would need to make a spot for it in Images.
A minimum of, that’s how this may go down. Images, it’s possible you’ll acknowledge, makes use of the Android package deal identify “com.google.android.apps.pictures” however we’ve additionally discovered reference to a at the moment unknown “com.google.android.apps.photosxr” app.
It’s fully doable this new XR version may share its codebase with the Images app now we 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 machine. Or it could 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 gadgets — proper now, it’s simply too early to say with any confidence, both means.
Nonetheless, it’s cool to consider Images working to assist a complete new class of media. 3D’s had a tough time catching on in any significant, lasting means, however will the present XR push be sufficient to lastly make it stick? We certain anticipate finding out.
