Google wants to help others improve VR projections, too. To that end, it's proposing a Projection Independent Mesh standard that would simply tell a video player how to project the raw VR info. The approach would use extremely small amounts of data (just 4KB for EAC), so it wouldn't require gobs of bandwidth or new hardware. You can find a draft version of the standard on GitHub.

At the moment, you'll have to use an Android device to watch videos that use EAC. Desktop and iOS viewing is coming later, Google says. And unless it's a specially optimized video, you probably won't see it -- YouTube still ingests clips based on a conventional projection format. This upgrade is more about the long-term future of VR rather than an immediate upgrade.