[throwaway34241]

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]

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.