Google Daydream, a little review

Thursday evening I was able to try for some minutes a Google Daydream headset, thanks to guys of GDG Torino that invited us of Immotionar at their Sognando La Realtà event. This is my very little review about it.

If you have ever tried a Samsung GearVR headset… well, the experience is quite identical. Only differences with it are that it is more comfortable and that you can interact using a little remote. And that’s it with this review. I’ve told you that it was little… 😀

Just kidding, but in fact these are the most important things that I have to say. Google Daydream is a nice mobile headset, where you can insert your mobile phone and live virtual reality.

Take a Google Pixel, put it in there and thanks to NFC magic, your Daydream home menu will appear!

Only supported phone is Google Pixel at the moment, but more are about to come (for example one Motorola and one Lenovo). The advantage of Daydream platform over GearVR one is that it will compatible with lots of phones from different vendors, so it will be an open platform (and this is the reason why it will outperform its competitor in the end, I guess). Google Daydream is all covered in fabric… this has been a choice of Google, so that the headset resembles a piece of cloting and seems more a natural thing to wear (a very hippy marketing thing in my opinion :D).

Google announced Daydream

Yesterday Google announced its new flagship phone, Pixel, and a lot of new epic stuff, among which its new virtual reality platform: Daydream. If you, like me, didn’t watch the live streaming (too lazy to do it), you can read the main points of the conference here.

So, Google abandoned Nexus brand to start the Pixel one: the phone is quite powerful, has a good design and has reduced the gap with Samsung and Apple phones. New software features like Google Assistant and free cloud storage to store your photos at high resolutions make it a lot appealing to consumers. This is an image of two Pixel phones… cool, aren’t they?

Google Pixel phones… look at how the design is beautiful (image from The Verge)

With this new phone, the company has launched its new virtual reality platform, that is Daydream and its new headset, the Daydream View.

Should you buy a VR headset?

Some months ago I started being part of the reddit virtual reality communities, like /r/virtualreality, /r/oculus and /r/osvr. This communities are really great (if you’re not part of them… what are you waiting for? Subscribe!), but sometimes there are questions that are just repeated one bazillion times: if I had one dollar for each time I answered them, I’d be the king of the world.

One of this recurring question is “Should I buy a VR headset?”, so I’m writing this post just to give you an answer from my perspective once for all (and so at the next time I’ll see this question on reddit, I could just type a link to this post… much easier). I’ll give you answers to other common questions in the next posts.

Let’s start : do you have to buy a VR headset?

The answer is… it depends. And with this answer full of wisdom, the article ends here, thanks for reading…