Google will build its own Daydream VR headset & controller

Yesterday, Google announced plans to grow its VR efforts through a new platform called Daydream. Today, the company shared more details, including that it will build its own hardware for the platform.

“Reference design” — specs anyone can build to

Google explained yesterday, during the opening of its Google I/O developers conference that Daydream, which it has named its new VR platform, would have “reference designs” for a headset and controller that manufacturers could use.

In other words, these were specs of what the hardware needed, but anyone could build a particular device with those specs however they wanted. That’s why Google shared only a generic image of how Daydream hardware might look, because there’s not going to be one exact model, if you will:

Google to build its own hardware

Now, it turns out that Google itself will use those same specs to build its own hardware, specifically its own Daydream headset and controller. Clay Bavor, Google’s vice president of VR, shared the news during a special session on VR at Google I/O today.

Daydream videos

Also shared during the session was a video from Google about how the controller experience would be. Here’s a sample of that:

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/733331262576852992

Unreal Engine also shared a video of what it is doing with Daydream, which gives some glimpses of hardware that Unreal has apparently built for development:

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/733330895604584448

You can see the entire session here, at the moment — start about one hour in.

Read more of the details on Daydream that were shared in our live blog below: