Google creates virtual reality arm

Google isn’t going to let Facebook dominate the virtual reality market without a fight.

Bavor was Google’s VP for product management, and supervised some of the company’s most important products including Google Docs, Drive and Gmail.

The Displaced VR campaign doesn’t only prove that VR is just ripe, but also that Google’s Cardboard is the ideal choice for newcomers to the medium, and also to hobbyists, that don’t want to shell $599 – the price of an Oculus Rift; to experience a virtual world.

Experts will likely guess that Bavor will aid the company expand its presence further with Cardboard, a less expensive VR solution that was a hit so far for New York Times readers previous year. Google has already taken steps to help users create more VR content, such as making YouTube more VR friendly, and announcing its Jump platform for capturing VR video.

The retailer is hoping the arrival of VR in living rooms will open up a new avenue for its struggling business, which has been squeezed by the rise of online retailers like Amazon on one side and the popularity of mobile gaming on the other. Unlike the $US649 Oculus Rift that requires a whole separate (ridiculously high-spec’d) PC to create its VR illusion, Cardboard works with whatever silicon chips are packed inside your smartphone. Competition is getting much more intense in the emerging virtual reality space, and Google is surely gearing up for it.

Google has been dabbling in virtual reality for a while now, however, with the company releasing a do-it-yourself cardboard kit that turns into a budget virtual-reality headset.

And the amount of resources Google is now allocating suggests it’s planning something more permanent.

Also, Google has invested $542 million in augmented reality company Magic Leap, which is developing eyeglasses that project computer-generated images onto real life. In addition, there is now a dedicated virtual reality office within Google that encompasses the existing Google Cardboard team.

The NYT VR app provides users with news stories in virtual reality format “every month or so”. And there were several years during the 1990s, when VRML was the next big thing, that could have qualified as the year of virtual reality.