Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google’s Play Store may be planning to add support for a new device type.
- The app’s been adding text and image resources allowing it to identify “XR headset” devices.
- With both Samsung and Google interested in XR hardware, it would make sense to plan like this for the software, as well.
The Google Play Store is your destination for apps running on all sorts of Android-powered hardware. It’s got apps for smartphones, obviously, plenty of apps optimized for tablets and other big screens, as well as apps ready to run on your Wear OS smartwatch. Today we’re looking at the possibility of Google extending those categories to include a whole new product type, as we discover evidence that the Play Store is working to support extended reality (XR) headsets.
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XR, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a bit of an umbrella label that covers everything from full-immersive virtual reality to augmented- and mixed reality systems that blend real and virtual worlds. We know that Google and Samsung are both interested in XR hardware, so it would make a fair amount of sense to start seeing Android apps get ready to declare support for such devices.
Looking through version 43.3.32-31 of the Google Play Store app, we spot the inclusion of a new icon that sure appears to depict an XR headset, and a new text string explicitly mentioning “XR headset.”
While it’s not much at the moment, it feels reasonably obvious where this is headed, and we would not be at all surprised if Google has a new section of the Play Store ready to go alongside the arrival of some of this coming generation of Android-powered XR headsets.
Although plenty of companies have already built headsets that tap into Android in one way or another, many of those have approached the question of software in different ways — we just looked at some glasses from Rokid, for example, that are actually Android TV-based. And of course we had Cardboard and Daydream for phone-based VR, but that fad has largely fizzled. For manufacturers who want to have their new XR efforts taken seriously, Google taking XR apps seriously is just the kind of signal they’re going to want to see.
Right now, we’re just curious when we might get a chance to actually check out some of this hardware. CES is just a couple months away…
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