00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: We might be entering a new era for Google Photos.
00:03 – C. Scott Brown: And it’s all thanks to AI and XR.
00:05 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:06 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown and this is the Authority Insights Podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:15 – Mishaal Rahman: Those of us who have been using Google Photos for years, we’ve done it under the assumption of we implicitly trust Google Photos with safeguarding our thousands, tens of thousands of photos that we upload, because it’s a cheap, mostly free, very reliable service from one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And we’ve done it under the assumption we know we’re giving Google Photos all this data and we know they’re going to use it for training their variety of machine learning features. But, there’s been a separation between the features that they’ve been showing us so far and the features that they’re showing us now that are hugely generative AI based, and the difference between the features they’ve been trained on before and the difference with the features we have now is astounding.
01:00 – C. Scott Brown: It’s clear in a lot of ways that Google is basically trying to play catch up in some of its Google Photos offerings, with the face retouching figures that we’re going to talk about in this episode. But in other ways, we’re also treading new water with the image and video capabilities within Photos. And some of these are inevitably going to be controversial while others are pretty mind-blowing. They’re actually going to be pretty cool, I think. And I’m especially excited for one of them which is going to be XR support within Google Photos. So you’re going to be able to be able to put on a headset and relive your precious memories, in an immersive VR style environment. This was a game changer for the Apple Vision Pro and it’ll be great to have people who maybe don’t want to be in the Apple ecosystem have something similar on an Android XR powered headset that apparently is coming soon.
01:59 – Mishaal Rahman: Apparently, yeah, apparently next week is when Samsung’s going to be announcing their Moohan. But before we get to the XR stuff, what other features is Google going to be announcing for photos that doesn’t require shelling out multiple thousands of dollars for a brand new headset to actually enjoy?
02:17 – Mishaal Rahman: The first new feature we wanted to highlight in this episode is a new enhancement to the highlight videos capabilities that Google Photos announced back in 2023. For those who don’t know, back in late 2023, I think in October, Google introduced a feature that allows you to create these highlight reels from your photos. And the way it works is it uses AI, because of course it did, but back then we didn’t have the kind of AI that we do now. But it had, it used AI nonetheless to create reels of people, places, or activities that you’ve done in the past. You would go to Google Photos, and then you would select this option to create a highlight video, and what it would do is it would allow you to select people, places, or activities you’ve done, and then you could give it a name and then it would use AI to stitch those clips together into this highlight reel. And then after it’s done, you had the option to rearrange the clips or trim them or adjust the music that it’s synced to the video before you actually publish it.
03:19 – Mishaal Rahman: But now it looks like Google’s working on an enhanced version of this feature where instead of selecting people, places, or activities, now you can select these templates that allow you to stitch together whatever photos are recommended or that you select and have it follow this templated video content. And some examples we found are fall vibes, a trip recap, and hobbies. And then it also has some clip options, some music options that you can select from including not just some royalty free stuff, but also some licensed music including Naughty by Nature by Hip Hop Hooray and Breathe by Michelle Branch. So it’s an interesting feature that Google is adding here. If you’re watching the video, we’re playing a video feed right now from the Android Authority article that shows we uncovered this inside the APK what it might look like and yeah, it’s quite a different take on the highlight video capabilities that we used to have in Google Photos. So Scott, what is your take on this feature?
04:22 – C. Scott Brown: Well, first, this reminds me very much of a feature that has been available from DJI products for quite a while. So if you buy a gimbal or even the DJI Pocket series, the Pocket 3, which is for creators, one of the most important pieces of gear that you can own. There are ways where you can shoot these clips, it’ll give you instructions. It’ll say shoot this clip and then shoot a clip like this and then shoot a clip like this. And when you do all those clips, it stitches it all together, puts some music track on it and then you can very quickly upload it to your social media feed of choice.
04:55 – C. Scott Brown: And that is really cool because what you’re doing is you’re taking the editing steps out and you’re just shooting the shots you need. And then this fanciful magic editor in the background does all the work for you and then gives you the final product. This is different though. This is you’re just providing it raw footage from whatever. It’s pulling in all these different things and then creating something and then making it so you can publish it. So it’s very little effort on the part of the user.
05:31 – C. Scott Brown: I think that this is going to be cool because it’s going to make people feel like they’re an influencer of some kind. They’re going to be able to see their vacation in the way that a famous travel influencer would possibly present their most recent travels. And I think that’s cool, but at the same time, if anyone has any conceptions that this is going to make it so that an actual influencer would use these tools, I don’t think that’s going to be the case. I think that it’s going to be very messy and rudimentary and just pulling stuff from wherever to make something. And it may not have the things that you want, it may not cut the way that you want, and it’s going to be tricky.
06:17 – C. Scott Brown: But for what it is, I think it’ll just be fun. I can just imagine maybe somebody who is older and has no video editing capability and has never made an Instagram or a TikTok before, they’ll be like, “Oh, wow, cool. Look, my most recent vacation looks really awesome in this thing.” I’m going to share it to my friends on social media. So I think that’s really cool, but I don’t think this is going to replace the tried and true method of creating a narrative in your head and then shooting the shots you need and then stitching them together manually to create the story that you want to tell that matches your brand or your channel or whatever.
06:55 – Mishaal Rahman: I mean, yeah, for sure because whenever I go on trips and stuff like that, I take a lot of photos and a lot of videos and at the end, as soon as I land, as soon as I return home, one of the first things I do is I put it together in an album. And then I don’t really touch it after that. I don’t bother creating highlight reels or videos with it because it’s so much work. It’s so much work. One of my friends, he actually does that and it takes him weeks sometimes of just hours every other day because he’s not a professional video editor or anything, but he wants to create highlight videos from his travels and then he wants to show them to us. But it takes him a long time to do that. So he might have gone to Japan like six months ago and then finally last week he shows us a video about his vacation travel. So this is going to definitely improve the process for just your ordinary person and I think that’s a good thing because there’s a lot of people who don’t even create albums out of the photos they take.
07:49 – Mishaal Rahman: They just go somewhere, they take photos, and it’s in their Google Photos data bank as just a way to say, okay, I was there. I have these photos. If I want to look back at them, I’ll look back at them, and they don’t really do anything with that. So the ability to have this AI generate this highlight reel for you with basically just a couple of clicks is such a game changer, I think.
08:10 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and I think that it’ll be really cool. You’ll have to correct me here. I don’t think we found anything about this happening automatically like it does for the stories feed. That’ll be really cool. If you go on this trip, you take a ton of photos and videos and then you come home and then, maybe a day or two after you get home, you get this ping from Google Photos being like, “Hey, we stitched together this video for you. Isn’t this cool?” And then at the end of it, there’s a button that says, share this to wherever. That’ll be really cool because that would take all the friction away.
08:46 – C. Scott Brown: It would just be you would just be handed this video that you could share online so that your close friends who maybe didn’t go on the trip with you or aren’t close enough friends that you would have pinged them over and over again sending your photos of your kids in the pool or whatever. That will give some of them an option to have these memories made magical, because that’s what it feels like. At least sometimes with me.
09:11 – C. Scott Brown: When I open Google Photos and I see stories, sometimes there’s one that’s been happening a lot which is like feline fine or something like that, feline good. And it’s just pictures of cats that I’ve taken and my cats, other people’s cats, and it stitches together this little music or whatever. I like it. It’s a nice little treat every once in a while to see it and be reminded like, “Oh yeah, that was a great time that I had there.” So having that in a much more ready-to-share kind of thing, I feel like is a win-win for everybody.
09:44 – Mishaal Rahman: I do want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. You said that this is not going to replace professional video editing. But have you seen the kinds of videos people have been able to create with Veo 3.1 and Sora 2? I’m wondering if this is something if professional-looking videos is something that you will be able to create using these capabilities. Is Google going to be integrating Veo 3.1 in such a way potentially in the future that you can just give it a bunch of photos and then it could create a fake actual highlight reel that resembles an actual travel vlog using those photos. I think that would be really cool, but also really weird because it would obviously have to generate a lot of frames that just did not exist in your photo library to make that happen. But I think it’s something that could certainly happen down the line.
10:31 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing technologically right now preventing them from being able to do that. I think the key difference though, the key thing that separates a very successful influencer or a YouTuber or whoever and the amateurs is the ability to tell a story, the ability to visually keep you engaged as you progress through that story. And this is really difficult.
10:54 – C. Scott Brown: I have my own YouTube channel that I do my own videos separate from Android Authority on and yeah, this is the thing that I struggle with the most is how can I make it so that this is a progression that you want to watch until the end because every time you get to the next scene, you’re like, “Oh, that’s intriguing. I need more.” And then you keep watching. And I don’t think that the AI is going to be able to replicate that very well. I think that that’s going to be what separates the AI-powered automatic influencer content from the real stuff that actually keeps you engaged.
11:29 – C. Scott Brown: But who knows? Three, four years from now, I don’t know. Maybe there’s no such thing as influencers anymore, who knows? I could already hear people listening to this right now being like, “Oh my God, that’d be amazing.” But there are people, I think a lot of hate comes down on the idea of influencers, but in the end a lot of your favorite YouTubers are influencers. You’re an influencer.
11:38 – Mishaal Rahman: If everyone’s an influencer, nobody is.
11:58 – C. Scott Brown: And obviously people listening to this love you. So not all influencers. #notallinfluencers. Yeah.
11:58 – Mishaal Rahman: Hey, hey, they love you too. It’s not just a one-sided love affair here. But no, I think you’re right. It’s not going to replace influencers. I definitely think just in general, AI video creation is going to raise the bar. It is going to make I think influencers’ lives harder. Just no doubt about it because it’s going to raise the bar, it’s going to raise the minimum quality level that you expect to see from videos on social media. Because if everyone is able to create professional looking videos, even if they don’t have a narratively, they don’t have a narrative cohesion throughout the entire video, just the fact that you can create videos with that kind of level of polish or on the surface they look like they have that level of polish, I think it’s just going to make people scrutinize actual influencer created videos a lot more.
12:48 – Mishaal Rahman: They’re going to say, what separates your videos? What makes your video stand out now that everyone else can do these kinds of transitions or these kinds of intros? So I just think it’s going to make actual influencer created videos much better in the future, but also just much harder to create.
13:08 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and so one of the things that we’re kind of in the dark about with this new feature from Google is how will it be paywalled? Is it going to be blocked? This sounds like a really powerful tool, but is it so powerful and so useful for people who are influencers that Google could charge money for it, or integrate it into the wider Google subscription somehow, maybe as part of your Google One subscription, this is something that you would get. Maybe you get 10 edits a month, similar to what they do for Google Photos on certain features. So that’s another big question that we have. Lots of unknowns here, but I think you’re right. I think the core idea is really cool.
13:51 – C. Scott Brown: How much it’ll change the influencer game, I don’t know. But I’ve been saying for a long time that I think there’s a reckoning coming for the influencers and I think this is one of the reasons why it’s going to be so much easier to create this stuff that it’s going to really separate the people who are really doing a really great job from the lots of others that are just slop, it’s just AI-powered junk. So I feel like big changes are coming, I think for our industry.
14:28 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, it’s hard to predict what things could look like a couple of years down the line. But another way things are changing for potentially better, potentially worse depending how you look at it is how we edit photos and the realism of the photos that we post online. So for many years now, a lot of smartphone camera apps that have been pre-loaded have offered the ability to retouch your face, fix up blemishes or acne or pimples or eyeshadow and things like that.
14:56 – Mishaal Rahman: But now it looks like Google Photos is preparing to introduce similar features natively into the Google Photos app. So we discovered that Google Photos is working on such features as the ability to remove acne, to remove bags under your eyes, to clean up blemishes, dark circles, pimples, whiten your teeth, and more. So a lot of these features have, as I just mentioned, been available in stock camera apps for a long time, but they’ve never really been part of Google Photos.
15:23 – Mishaal Rahman: And the big difference between having it in your camera app versus having in Google Photos is that Google Photos has access to your entire photo library, if you uploaded your photos to it, going over a decade plus. Whereas your camera app can only do things to the photos that you take right now and today or in the future, so it can’t clean up the photos that you’ve taken in the past. So I think that’s a big difference.
15:45 – Mishaal Rahman: And yeah, I’m curious, Scott, you’ve used a lot of phones. Presumably you’ve used a lot of Chinese phones that love to turn those face retouching features on by default. What do you think of Google Photos adding this capability to the gallery app?
16:03 – C. Scott Brown: As you said, there are a lot of Chinese phones that do this and it’s really popular. It’s really popular for a particular audience to be able to make sure that when they take a photo that the representation of themselves that comes through in that photo is an idealized version of themselves. Maybe not what they actually look like at that particular moment, but what they would look like if they had a full face of makeup on or the lighting was perfect or whatever.
16:35 – C. Scott Brown: And that’s very popular and it’s very appealing to people who maybe are self-conscious about how they look or don’t like the way they look in photos or whatever. But I am concerned because Google Photos is for memories. Google Photos is for the stuff that happened to you. It’s the picture of your kids swinging on the swings. It’s the picture of your 20th birthday party. It’s the picture of your dad playing golf at his favorite place. These are things that are true to you, that are very important to you emotionally.
17:15 – C. Scott Brown: And when you start playing with that, playing with the reality of those images and videos, that’s when I get a little nervous because then I’m like, okay, this is not just I just took a shot of me to post on Instagram and oh, I just noticed I have a little pimple or whatever. I’m going to use this little tool to make sure that goes away and then share this on Instagram. That’s fine. But when you’re starting to actually change the way the photos actually, the reality of the situation of those photos going back like you said, a decade, that’s a little nerve-wracking. Because then what are you doing? Are you trying to beautify the way your memories actually happened? Where’s the line, I guess, is that?
18:04 – Mishaal Rahman: I’ve always struggled with this question because it’s like there are individual harms and gains and there’s societal harms and gains and it’s really hard to balance the two. At an individual level, if you’re just doing this because you want to feel good, you want to look back at a version of yourself that you think looks better than it actually did in the photo that you took at the time, then I think there’s no harm in using face retouching and just having that photo as your own keepsake.
18:31 – Mishaal Rahman: But if you’re an influencer, for example, sharing these photos on social media, and then at the aggregate level, we’ve seen studies on how teenage girls and teenagers in general who use Instagram develop mental health issues because they see these idealized people who are posting basically fake photos of themselves on Instagram and people are thinking, oh, this is how all women and how all men should look like. And these aren’t real photos of real people. I mean, they are real people, but they’re not the real photo showing how they actually look.
19:01 – Mishaal Rahman: They’re heavily edited and modified and touched up. And it’s been going on for years. So technically, as you mentioned earlier in the episode, Google’s playing catch up. So they’re not treading new water here by introducing this, but are they contributing to that societal, the issue is going plaguing mental health problems in this country and in the world.
19:23 – Mishaal Rahman: But then there’s also the other side, some people might see this as distasteful when they see a photo come to life when it shouldn’t have, when you create a video out of a photo when it shouldn’t have been moving or when you touch up parts of photos that are decades old and you remove aspects that weren’t there that they didn’t actually look like. But other people will look at it, you take a photo and you turn it into a video and they’ll have tears streaming down their eyes like, “Okay, this is how I remember him actually moving and him actually talking. This is amazing.” If I were to put on a VR headset and see a representation of a photo like I was actually there, having the memories rush back in my head as I’m looking at the photo in spatial space and kind of skipping ahead to the VR, the XR part of the story. But I think it really depends on the person and I think it’s tough for Google especially to balance the individual gains versus the societal potential societal harms that could arise from it.
20:25 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, interestingly enough, I saw a video just the other day, very similar to what you’re talking about. It was a very old woman, I don’t know how old she was, but she looked ancient. She was very, very old. And they had a photo of her, taken a long, long time ago of her at a dancing contest or dancing convention or something along those lines. And it was a still photograph of her dancing and then using the power of AI, they created a small video clip of her dancing that wouldn’t have been possible because video cameras literally were just not available for this kind of thing. And so there was never a video taken of this particular moment and then using AI, they were able to show her dancing.
21:07 – C. Scott Brown: And of course, just like you said, tears started streaming and she was like, “Oh my God, look at me, I’m dancing.” And that is powerful and I think as humans, we instinctively are like, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” Like this old woman is able to relive this memory that without this technology would not be possible. But that’s because it’s a woman dancing. What if it’s not that? What if it’s someone dying? What if it’s something that didn’t happen? What if it’s something horrible, something violent and obscene?
21:43 – C. Scott Brown: Once the pendulum swings the other way, then it’s not, it stops being like, “Oh, isn’t this lovely?” and it starts being like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” So let’s hit the brakes here. We got problems now. So I think that Google is playing with fire and the thing is that like you said at the top of this segment, it’s because it’s Google Photos. We already have Veo, we already have all these things where people can manually go and do this. And that’s fine.
22:15 – C. Scott Brown: I’m not sure I totally want to get on board with it, but at the same time, it’s a thing that you have to elect to do. When you bring that into Google Photos where people are treasuring their memories, then it’s like, do I really want this? It’s like parents who don’t want to share their kids on social media, somebody comes over and like, “Oh, my your baby’s so cute. Can I take a photo?” And they say, “No, please do not take a photo of my baby. I don’t want my baby on your social media thing.”
22:45 – C. Scott Brown: We need to start drawing lines in the sand like that. We have to sort of be our own parents and be like, “No, I don’t want these tools in my Google Photos. Thank you very much.” So who knows, maybe Google have an off switch and you can just be like, “We don’t want this. Get this off my feed or whatever,” but we’ll have to see.
23:03 – Mishaal Rahman: Unfortunately, the way things work is if Google won’t do it, then someone else will. And we’ve already seen that other companies have been doing it for years. So at this point, I can’t really hold Google’s feet to the fire very much because they’re basically just playing catchup on things that others have done for years. So it’s tough.
23:24 – Mishaal Rahman: Every time I see an AI feature, I’m always weighing the benefits of it versus the societal harms and the only way that I really vibe with any AI feature like there’s no controversial aspect of it is whenever it’s used for comedic purposes. And I just wanted to quickly highlight this article by Stephen who went through and it’s not Google Photos related technically, but in Google Meet they introduced some virtual makeup options and he was brave enough to put his own face through all of these touch-up options and basically just give himself a rosy pink lip, some makeup and everything and if people only use Google Photos AI features for things like this, I would love it. I think no one would complain because it would be absolutely hilarious to just imagine yourself with a full face of makeup and lipstick, especially if you’re a guy who doesn’t really typically wear makeup. I think it would be hilarious if more people did things like this.
But unfortunately, with the openness and the ability to prompt AI in almost any way you want, there’s a lot of ways it’s going to be misused. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees and thinks it should be used for only comedic purposes, but that’s how things are.
24:35 – C. Scott Brown: But I think the next thing we’re going to talk about which is the photos within the XR environment. This is something that I think, I don’t know how much generative AI is being used for this particular feature, but I think that this is something that’s a little less controversial. So I think this is a good one to sort of slide the podcast episode down a bit from talking about these major topics.
25:04 – Mishaal Rahman: This one I think is just straightforward. I think this is amazing. So Google Photos, this is no secret. Google announced in December of last year that they’re working on Android XR and that they said sometime before the end of this year, an XR headset will be launching. And then actually this week, Samsung confirmed the official launch date of its Project Moohan headset. They said it’ll be launching on October 21st at 10:00 p.m. Eastern and of course, it’ll be running Android XR. So, we do not have to wait long to find out to actually get our hands properly on the XR experience from Google.
25:40 – Mishaal Rahman: But ahead of that launch, we have discovered evidence in the Google Photos app that Google’s working on a new spatial tab within the Photos app and this tab will basically contain your photosphere or panorama photos. And you’ll also be able to open regular photos and then click this go immersive button. Presumably that will allow you to see your panorama and photosphere photos in virtual reality on your XR headset, but whenever we tap this button, it crashes. The app crashes and obviously because we don’t actually have our hands on the Moohan headset yet, so we couldn’t actually try out how it works.
26:17 – Mishaal Rahman: But I imagine the way it’ll work is I think actually we did a demo of this at Google I/O. I do recall seeing spatialized photos in Google Photos when I was trying on the headset at Google I/O like we would open photos, there was a button to go immersive and then it would create, it would remove the background, it would darken the image and it would show a gallery and it would show the image completely stretched around our face as we could see it in the virtual reality space. So I think it’s a really cool feature.
26:47 – C. Scott Brown: So, and I think that from what we’ve read about this, it’s not only going to make it so that the photo itself is immersive around you, but it also is going to add artificial depth which, which, I mean, obviously your camera and Google Photos are already doing when you when you take something in portrait mode, when you swap your phone camera into portrait mode, all it’s really doing is giving the illusion of depth and then blurring the second level. So you’ve got your subject in one level and then what’s behind it is the second level and it’s able to blur that down. So really this is just sort of using existing technology to make something more immersive.
27:29 – C. Scott Brown: But I mean, I think that this is a way to upscale if you will, something that you’ve already done. So it’s like, you go to some vacation destination, the South of France and you take an amazing photo of the beach surrounding the town of Nice and then you put on your headset and then you swap to that photo and then, using the power of this feature, all of a sudden it looks like you’re in this 3D representation of not the beach, but the photo you took at the beach, which I think is really cool because it’s just a way of re-experiencing a photo in a different way than you would just looking at it on your phone.
28:20 – C. Scott Brown: Nothing’s being changed. It’s just the photo is being presented in a new way. It’s like seeing your photo in IMAX or something like that.
28:31 – Mishaal Rahman: Speaking of IMAX actually, I was actually thinking, you know how they did the, you actually went to the Sphere and you saw the recreation of The Wizard of Oz using generative AI. So I was thinking what if, a lot of the photos we took, we can already use AI to generate depth information to extract subject and the background and separate the two and there are also AI features that kind of fill in the background now, they expand scenes. What if in the future it gets good enough to where you took a photo and now you can use AI to fill in the rest of the background and instead of your mind recreating or imagining what the rest of the background looked like, it used AI to fill it in. So you would actually have a photo, you put on your headset, you look at it and then you can actually tilt your head in all directions and maybe using just Google Earth satellite images, Google Maps satellite images and AI in combination to create a full 360-degree wrap-around recreation of that moment of time when you took that photo.
29:29 – Mishaal Rahman: I don’t know how good it would look. It would maybe not look very good right now, but in the future, it might be amazing enough to just actually let you relive a moment, which I think would be amazing.
29:40 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, the issue that you would face there is the same issue that they faced in The Wizard of Oz with the recreation at the Sphere. For people who are listening who maybe don’t know what we’re talking about. So there’s a theater in Las Vegas called Sphere, which is literally a sphere and the theater inside it is spherical. So it goes all the way around so you can tilt your head back, you can look up, you can look around you and everywhere you look is screen. And so they’re showing The Wizard of Oz there and The Wizard of Oz was shot in a 4×3 aspect ratio at like, it’s like this big. And so in order to present the footage properly on this spherical dome around you, they had to do this process called outpainting, which is what Mishaal was just talking about where AI sort of expands the image and fills in the information.
30:28 – C. Scott Brown: The problem that they faced with The Wizard of Oz and the problem that they would face with what you’re describing doing with your photos is that there’s people there. If you took a photo of you standing on the edge of a cliff, maybe the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. You pull back from that, it’s very easy to figure out like, okay, the AI understands where you’re standing on the cliff and it fills in the information of the rest of the cliff space around you, the ocean behind you and all those things.
30:55 – C. Scott Brown: But what if the photo is you at your birthday party and it expands out and all of a sudden there’s all these AI-generated people that you’ve never met before in your life. And that’s the same problem that they faced with The Wizard of Oz, there’s the very famous scene where Dorothy is, they’ve got a close up on Dorothy’s face at the end and she’s like, “And you were there, and you were there.” And that shot is literally just Judy Garland’s face pointing and you don’t have any idea who she’s pointing at. So they had to pull out and sort of figure out like where was the uncle standing, where was the mom standing, when she points which one is she pointing at and how are we going to render these people, these people that really existed, these actors and actresses that really were there. How are we going to render them properly so they don’t look like freaky AI slop. So the same problem would happen with what you’re describing.
31:44 – C. Scott Brown: But in certain situations, that would be super cool. You’re standing on the Cliffs of Moher and all of a sudden you’re there. You can turn around and you’re like in that exact moment that you were when you were actually there, that’d be sweet. But just no people.
32:04 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, I guess maybe the one way they could solve it is make it optional. If you want to fill in 360-degree surroundings, make it an option. But the better long-term solution though would be to actually start rolling out phones that are capable of capturing true spatial content in 360 degrees, including not only photos, but also videos and right now there are very few Android phones. I think there are not really any that can capture spatial video like the iPhone 15 Pro can. But there were rumors that Samsung actually is working on spatial video capture support within their camera app. There was evidence that they were updating their Camera Assistant Good Lock module to add a new 3D capture setting.
32:47 – Mishaal Rahman: And this would presumably be for a future Samsung smartphone with dual cameras capable of capturing depth information while video recording. I think this is something that Google could solve too if they added such a feature to a future Pixel device so that you can capture depth-enabled videos and then you can potentially view those on an Android XR headset. But that obviously wouldn’t solve the problem of a lot of our old media collection not having that depth information. So you would have to recreate it or basically fake it with machine learning and you would run into those problems you just mentioned.
33:20 – C. Scott Brown: I think a lot of this is going to come down to how successful this XR headset actually is. Obviously, we’ve mentioned the Apple Vision Pro a few times already in this episode and the Vision Pro is a big dud. It did not sell well at all. Last I checked, they sold less than a million units.
33:38 – Mishaal Rahman: That’s a day of iPhone sales right there.
33:38 – C. Scott Brown: And for Apple, that’s terrible.
33:42 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah.
33:42 – C. Scott Brown: That is nuts that they only sold that many. And obviously you could point to a lot of problems, the Vision Pro was $3,500. I do not think the XR headset from Samsung is going to be that expensive, but.
33:58 – Mishaal Rahman: I really hope it’s not.
34:00 – C. Scott Brown: But we’ve also seen the numbers that we’ve seen leak have been pretty close to $2,000, which is still that’s a lot of money. It might not be $3,500, but $2,000 bucks is not, you don’t just be like, “I’m going to go buy this thing for $2,000.” That’s something you have to actually sit and go to your budget and be like, “Can I afford this thing, or not?”
34:22 – C. Scott Brown: So it’ll be a big test I think. We could have all sorts of really cool spatial photography things that include depth and maybe Android phones with cameras that are capable of producing a 360-degree image around you, sort of like an Insta360 kind of crammed into your phone kind of thing. That all might be cool, but it’s not really going to be useful unless these headsets actually take off. And the Vision Pro didn’t take off. So if Apple can’t make it take off, I don’t know if Samsung and Google can make it take off. So that’s going to be the real question.
34:57 – Mishaal Rahman: Personally, I think these spatial photos, these features like that we have in Apple Photos and Google Photos, to see your photos in virtual reality, that’s a killer feature. That’s definitely a wow moment when you try it for the first time. But it’s clearly not enough of a killer feature for people to overcome the “Hey, this is 2,000, 3,000, $4,000.” I’m not spending that much just to have this capability at my disposal. It’s clearly not enough to pull people in.
35:26 – Mishaal Rahman: So Google will have to do a lot more than just spatialize your photos if they want people to actually buy Android XR headsets. And we’ll have to wait and find out in just a couple of days. I think this episode’s going live on Saturday the 18th, so actually just like three days from the time of when this episode goes live. So yeah.
35:46 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about on the following episode because that will be, I’m sure, focused a lot on the XR headset once we learn everything there is to learn about it.
35:59 – Mishaal Rahman: Oh yeah.
36:00 – C. Scott Brown: So stay tuned for that.
36:01 – Mishaal Rahman: And we’ll definitely also have content on the Android XR headset on the main Android Authority channel as well as I think you’re also going to be publishing something on CSB maybe.
36:10 – C. Scott Brown: Yes, expect videos on the XR headset on all the Android Authority channels. But yes, plenty of articles, plenty of videos, so there’ll be a lot to talk about, I’m sure.
36:19 – Mishaal Rahman: We’ll definitely be covering the launch for sure, so don’t worry about that.
36:23 – C. Scott Brown: No, this is a big deal. Setting the tone here. This is a big deal. This is a brand new Android operating system and this is the first device running that operating system. And it’s also a brand new entry category from Samsung. Yes, Samsung’s made VR headsets before, Galaxy VR and things like that, but nothing on this level. Because you and I have already used Project Moohan at Google I/O and it’s very different. It’s a huge step up from Galaxy VR or Galaxy, what was it, Galaxy Gear?
36:57 – Mishaal Rahman: Galaxy Gear and Google Cardboard.
37:01 – C. Scott Brown: It’s a huge step up from those types of things and all we’ve done is use the prototype. So I’m sure the real thing is going to be even better.
37:09 – C. Scott Brown: So this is a big deal. It may not be a huge success because like I said, the Apple Vision Pro has not been a huge success, but it’s still a big deal. So there’s going to be a ton of coverage from us. So stay tuned for that.
37:24 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, for now at least, that’s everything we’ve got for you because we don’t actually have the XR headset, so we can’t talk anymore about it until we do. But if you want to find out more about the Google Photos features that are coming in the near future, you can find all the links to the stories that we talked about down in the show notes and you can find more amazing stories to read over on AndroidAuthority.com.
37:45 – C. Scott Brown: Thanks for listening to the Authority Insights Podcast. We publish every week on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. You can follow us everywhere on social media at Android Authority and you can follow me personally on Instagram, Bluesky and my own YouTube channel at C. Scott Brown.
38:02 – Mishaal Rahman: As for me, I’m on most social media platforms posting day in and day out about Android. If you want to keep up with the latest in the Android world, go to my Linktree and follow me on the platform that you like best. Thanks for listening.
