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Andrey Doronichev who is the Director of Product Management at Daydream joined the stage today to talk about the important changes coming for the VR platform. “To build great stuff you need great tools,” Doronichev said. “So today I want to tell you about 3 new tools.”

Doronichev talked on the topics of Faster Iteration, High-Fidelity Graphics, and Immersive Web. To improve speed and performance for the Daydream platform, the team developed something called “Instant Preview.” It’s a tool that lets you make changes in your desktop and instantly see it on your mobile VR device. Instant Preview is deeply integrated in the editor and mobile device. They send the sensor data from the headset and controller to the PC which emulates and renders the scene. The result is sent back to the device as a stereo video stream. This is done with low latency as well. This will allow developers to have an uninterrupted flow. Instant Preview is launching today for both Unity and Unreal Engine.

To improve High-Fidelity Graphics on the Daydream platform, the team is launching a new tool called Seurat. “With this tool you can take a high-fidelity scene and run it mobile VR in real time,” said Doronichev. It works by defining the volume within which you want the user to move around and view the scene. You also define target parameters by the number of polygons. Then the tool will take dozens of images from different parts of the defined volume which will generate an entirely new 3D scene which looks identical to the original but dramatically simplified. You can also add dynamic elements into it.

A company that recently used Seurat was ILMxLAB who creates amazing storytelling experiences. They’ve recently worked on delivering an immersive Star Wars: Rogue One VR experience to the Daydream platform and used the new technology to enhance the details to the story. And to put it lightly, the company was highly impressed on the delivery of Seurat. It allowed their studio to create unbelievable content full of details for all the Star Wars fans out there. You might be wondering, “How impressive is Seurat?” Well, according to the Google team, Seurat can render 50 million triangles and 3 gigabytes of textures in 13 milliseconds per frame on a mobile GPU. And this will be the technology used on the upcoming standalone VR headsets with 6DoF. “And it looks good as the original,” Doronichev stated. Seurat already supports Unity and Unreal.

The Daydream team also wants to improve the Immersive Web platform. And to do this, Google will be bringing the full chrome browser into VR. “You’ll be able to use the Daydream controller to navigate any regular web page and follow links. And for web VR experiences you just get transported into fully immersive worlds. And of course you’ll be able to watch any web video in a theater like environment with a large screen,” said Doronichev. Your history, bookmarks, and tabs will be there as well if you log in using the same account. Chrome for VR and AR will be coming later this year.