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Clay Bavor (the VP mentioned in the article) has made fairly strategic missteps at Google. Project Tango was developed under him (AR sensors on a phone), which

Clay Bavor (the VP mentioned in the article) has made fairly strategic missteps at Google. Project Tango was developed under him (AR sensors on a phone), which got canned. Google then scrambled to play catch up after iPhone announced their structured light AR sensors and ARKit. Daydream VR was supposed to compete against Oculus, but shut down before their technology (imo better than Oculus) made it into production to focus on ARCore. Best of luck to him, hope he's learned from his mistakes.

crakenzak 5y ago
It seems like the issue isn't technical -- but more managerial and lack of putting in the necessary time to see the product go from Lab -> Maturity. Hopefully this changes soon.
- MichaelEstes 5y ago
  That's interesting, because Niantic went from lab to maturity amazingly well, but only after being spun off from Google during the Alphabet restructure.
pjmlp 5y ago
It doesn't help that whatever SDKs they put out, are a joke compared with iOS frameworks. Just compare the effort to use Vulkan, where they don't provide bindings, point out to some random GitHub repository, and wish us luck. Also like most stuff presented at IO, SceneForm hardly lasted more than one year. Meanwhile iOS frameworks are usable from all major platform languages, and even if sometimes buggy, way easier to start than doing your own Vulkan based engine from scratch.
jobigoud 5y ago
I'm still sad they killed Project Tango. This had so much potential.
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  My rule of thumb is that anything Google launches with the word "Project" in the name usually never gets off the ground. I think it shows they don't really have confidence in it, and they're trying to drum up interest by previewing their cool tech before it's ready.
- VRay 5y ago
  yeah, it's pretty funny, Google was so far ahead of Oculus/Facebook on AR tech that they made Oculus look like a joke. It's a real "tortoise and the hare" situation
  - throwaway34241 5y ago
    It's always been incomprehensible to me why they went all the way to production on $500 standalone devices with inside-out tracking but no tracked controllers, then gave up and let Oculus/FB/Meta eat their lunch. They did the hard part (the inside-out tracking)! And 3D input was obviously a game changer and the future (for VR) to anyone who had tried it out, which included basically everyone who had been to a VR conference at the time (and the tech had been done decently at a consumer level as far back as 2010 with Sony's Move controllers). Why go all the way to production on a platform that obviously has no future? Why give up right before the basic UX factors are met? And now they're putting the same person in charge again under 'labs' branding? It's really hard to be optimistic about this leading to products that go anywhere. Google obviously has tons of tech and talent, but sometimes it feels like they manage to be way less than the sum of their parts due to poor management.
    - VRay 5y ago
      It's crazy, man. I'd expect it from Microsoft, but it blows me away that Google went this route Facebook went from ZERO firmware expertise to where they are today. They're still asking idiotic, irrelevant leetcode questions and filtering out a lot of good hardware/firmware people, but it's entirely possible that in a few years they'll actually have a world class device team up and running. Maybe Google was just too short-sighted. They kept trying to jimmy VR into all the world's low-quality phones, and then gave up really quickly after that proved unworkable.
high_derivative 5y ago
Frankly, a problem at Google is that they have a lot of VPs with very long tenures (15+ years) who are simply in these positions because they have been along for the ride. In other places they would long have been fired for underperforming, at Google they get to keep messing up because core business is performing too well.

crakenzak 5y ago

It seems like the issue isn't technical -- but more managerial and lack of putting in the necessary time to see the product go from Lab -> Maturity. Hopefully this changes soon.

MichaelEstes 5y ago
That's interesting, because Niantic went from lab to maturity amazingly well, but only after being spun off from Google during the Alphabet restructure.

pjmlp 5y ago

It doesn't help that whatever SDKs they put out, are a joke compared with iOS frameworks. Just compare the effort to use Vulkan, where they don't provide bindings, point out to some random GitHub repository, and wish us luck. Also like most stuff presented at IO, SceneForm hardly lasted more than one year. Meanwhile iOS frameworks are usable from all major platform languages, and even if sometimes buggy, way easier to start than doing your own Vulkan based engine from scratch.

jobigoud 5y ago

I'm still sad they killed Project Tango. This had so much potential.

iainmerrick 5y ago
My rule of thumb is that anything Google launches with the word "Project" in the name usually never gets off the ground. I think it shows they don't really have confidence in it, and they're trying to drum up interest by previewing their cool tech before it's ready.
VRay 5y ago
yeah, it's pretty funny, Google was so far ahead of Oculus/Facebook on AR tech that they made Oculus look like a joke. It's a real "tortoise and the hare" situation
- throwaway34241 5y ago
  It's always been incomprehensible to me why they went all the way to production on $500 standalone devices with inside-out tracking but no tracked controllers, then gave up and let Oculus/FB/Meta eat their lunch. They did the hard part (the inside-out tracking)! And 3D input was obviously a game changer and the future (for VR) to anyone who had tried it out, which included basically everyone who had been to a VR conference at the time (and the tech had been done decently at a consumer level as far back as 2010 with Sony's Move controllers). Why go all the way to production on a platform that obviously has no future? Why give up right before the basic UX factors are met? And now they're putting the same person in charge again under 'labs' branding? It's really hard to be optimistic about this leading to products that go anywhere. Google obviously has tons of tech and talent, but sometimes it feels like they manage to be way less than the sum of their parts due to poor management.
  - VRay 5y ago
    It's crazy, man. I'd expect it from Microsoft, but it blows me away that Google went this route Facebook went from ZERO firmware expertise to where they are today. They're still asking idiotic, irrelevant leetcode questions and filtering out a lot of good hardware/firmware people, but it's entirely possible that in a few years they'll actually have a world class device team up and running. Maybe Google was just too short-sighted. They kept trying to jimmy VR into all the world's low-quality phones, and then gave up really quickly after that proved unworkable.

high_derivative 5y ago

Frankly, a problem at Google is that they have a lot of VPs with very long tenures (15+ years) who are simply in these positions because they have been along for the ride. In other places they would long have been fired for underperforming, at Google they get to keep messing up because core business is performing too well.