TL;DR
- Google’s currently working to catch up with Apple’s headset efforts through Android XR.
- Google Photos already appears to be preparing to support XR content in the form of spatial video and photos.
- It’s possible we could see this arrive in the form of a new Photos XR app.
3D video has been around for decades, and over that lengthy lifespan it’s taken a lot of different forms, from those early red/blue anaglyph films to immersive side-by-side videos you might view with a VR headset (or Google Cardboard back in the day). With the Vision Pro, Apple supports what it calls spatial video, that not just stores depth information in a clever, space-saving way, but also makes it easier to do backwards compatibility with 2D screens.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Peeling back a few layer on version 6.27 of Google Photos for Android, we’ve identified a couple new text strings that make reference to spatial (or, spatialized, we guess) media:
Code
<string name="photos_spatial_tab_emptyview_caption">Spatialized photos and videos will appear here</string>
<string name="photos_spatial_tab_emptyview_title">Nothing here yet</string>That would suggest that Google could be preparing a new tab for the app’s collections that features only this kind of 3D-enabled spatial video and photos. With Android XR getting ready to open the doors on the need to consume this kind of content, it only follows that Google would want to make a place for it in Photos.
At least, that’s how this could go down. Photos, you may recognize, uses the Android package name “com.google.android.apps.photos” but we’ve also found reference to a currently unknown “com.google.android.apps.photosxr” app.
It’s entirely possible this new XR edition could share its codebase with the Photos app we have now, but we’d only get the XR experience and see all that spatial media when using the XR version of the app on an Android XR device. Or it may be the case that the existing Photos app is actually planning to let you browse your library of spatial media even on traditional 2D devices — right now, it’s just too early to say with any confidence, either way.
Still, it’s cool to think about Photos working to support a whole new class of media. 3D’s had a hard time catching on in any meaningful, lasting way, but will the current XR push be enough to finally make it stick? We sure look forward to finding out.
