Google Cloud’s Immersive Stream for XR platform was previously limited to providing interactive 3D and augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, but now the service will soon support augmented reality and virtual reality headset devices.
At I/O 2022 in May, Sundar Pichai said that the new Immersive View could be run in Google Maps using “Google Cloud Immersive Stream” on any smartphone. Google Cloud later detailed Immersive Stream for XR as a way for “users to get an immersive, interactive and photo-realistic experience without having to download an app.
The company believes that at this stage mobile GPUs are still struggling to create realistic enough images to provide an immersive experience, which requires desktop GPUs.
Here the phone sends input events to our cloud service, such as camera poses, and then our cloud service takes those camera poses and renders realistic images using powerful desktop GPUs, which are then streamed to the device as video frames. The device then takes these video frames and combines them with the camera images to create an immersive and realistic experience for this particular vehicle.
Today, the Immersive Stream for XR platform is available on Android, iOS and the desktop web. The latter platform allows you to view 3D models in Safari and Chrome, while mobile devices are where you’ll find the AR mode, which lets you place objects in real space and adapt them to various environmental conditions, such as lighting.
Google said earlier this week that it is “actively developing an OpenXR client” to stream XR experiences to head-mounted displays (HMDs) that are compatible with the standard. The XR immersive stream on the headset will support VR mode and stereoscopic augmented reality mode.
