At the I/O 2022 conference in May this year, Sundar Pichai said that in any smartcell phoneThe new Immersive View can be run in Google Maps using “Google Cloud Immersive Stream”. Google Cloud later detailed Immersive Stream for XR as a way for “users to have an immersive, interactive, and photorealistic experience without downloading an app.”
The company believes that at this stage it is still difficult for mobile GPUs to create sufficiently realistic images because they cannot provide an immersive experience, which requires desktop GPUs:
The phone here sends input events to our cloud service, such as camera poses, and our cloud service takes those camera poses and uses a powerful desktop-class GPU to render photorealistic images, which are then streamed to the device as video frames .The device then takes these video frames and combines them with camera images to create an immersive and realistic experience for this particular car model.
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 is where you’ll find AR modes that allow you to place objects in real space and adapt them to various environmental conditions, such as lighting .
Google said earlier this week that it was “actively developing an OpenXR client” to stream XR experiences to head-mounted displays (HMDs) compatible with the standard. XR immersive streaming on the headset will support both VR mode and Stereoscopic Augmented Reality mode.
