Google Daydream View: Mobile VR, One Year Later (Premium)

Google’s most elegant mobile VR solution doesn’t get a lot of attention—in my home or elsewhere—from what I can tell. So maybe it’s time for another look.

My Daydream View arrived one year ago. Like Windows Mixed Reality on PCs, this headset raised the bar, in this case for mobile-based virtual reality (VR). But its limitations were, and still are, frustrating. And one year later, I’m not sure the needle has moved all that much.

Which is a shame, because VR can be quite immersive and entertaining, and you can lose yourself even in the often fuzzy and always low-resolution experiences it offers. I feel like we’re so close. But not quite there.

The issues with VR on mobile are many: Daydream View, like other mobile VR solutions, relies on your phone for its processing power, and it can drain the phone’s battery very quickly. Worse, it can heat up the phone alarmingly; if the phone gets too hot, which it can, it might literally shut off as an emergency life-saving measure.

Mobile VR is also hampered somewhat by imprecise controls. On Google Cardboard, for example, you have exactly one hardware button with which to interact.

But Daydream View, like PC-based VR solutions, adds a controller, which in this case looks like a small remote control and adds a few more hardware buttons, plus movements and gestures. This all adds up to a more complete package, and it allows for far more sophisticated experiences.

(In the PC VR space, and with HoloLens, hardware makers have likewise realized that some kind of controller is necessary; Windows Mixed Reality headsets, for example, come with two Motion controllers, and you can of course use an Xbox controller too.)

But the biggest issue with Daydream View, and with mobile VR in general—actually, with VR, period—is that it’s still hugely inconvenient. Daydream View, in particular, is compatible with only a few handsets, and if your handset has a mono speaker, still painfully common, you’re going to want to break out the headphones. Too, you may need to remove your phone’s case, which can be awkward. (The Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR headset I recently wrote about also requires you remove the phone’s case, and that device can be complex to use too.)

The payoff for all this pain is a slowly-growing collection of content. Which may or may not be of interest to you, depending on what you’re looking for.

In the PC space, this is less of a problem. There, VR will always have a viable niche with gaming, and that the other experiences can evolve alongside that as the technical capabilities improve. Microsoft has raised the bar nicely by making Windows Mixed Reality part of the platform, and by putting room sensors right on the headset, removing a lot of the complexity. But there’s still complexity to be had, of course, and the perceived resolution is still too low. The headsets are big and bulky, too, and have to be tethered to a fairly beefy computer. All that will continue improving over time, obviously.

In the mobile space, the headsets tend to be less bulky, and Daydream View, in particular, is about as comfortable as something of this size can be. But the potential size reductions here are less obvious than they are on the PC: Mobile VR headsets will always need to be big enough to strap a smartphone display to your eyes, somehow. That is both their advantage and their curse.

Will mobile processors ever improve enough to allow phones to handle VR without melting the device like a meteor racing to earth? It’s unclear: My understanding is that ARM is already more efficient than rival chipsets, and Qualcomm and others have already moved to a tiny 10 nm manufacturing process.

Anyway, VR is one of those things you either like or don’t, but that assumes you’ve even tried it at all, or recently. With mobile VR selling for as little as $15—for Google Cardboard, though I strongly recommend springing for a more complete solution like Daydream View, which costs $100—there’s some incentive to just give it a shot. You may be surprised by how much you like it. And if you do, you may even want to begin thinking about a more compelling PC-based VR solution.

That said, my own Daydream View has been sitting here in my office for the past year, mostly unused. And that may ultimately say more about this kind of product than anything I might write.