Samsung will be adding support for Google’s Daydream VR platform to its latest flagship smartphones later this summer.
Since Google launched Daydream last year, there’s been a notable absence of phones that support the platform. Google placed stringent rules in place so that only phones with super-dense displays and powerful processors would work with Daydream – shutting everyone out of the game, basically.
But during today’s keynote at the annual Google I/O 2017 Developer Conference, Google confirmed that Samsung would soon add support for the technology. According to Clay Bavor, who heads up Google’s VR team, both the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Samsung Galaxy S8+ will get Daydream functionality this summer.
Excitingly, Bavor also revealed that a second phone would be supporting the technology – LG’s next flagship phone. The Google VR lead didn’t name the phone, but it seems very likely that the handset will be the successor to last year’s LG V20 phone. This handset wasn’t available in the UK, but was very popular in the USA. We’d guess that the phone Bavor is referencing will be called the LG V30, but we’ll have to wait for official word from LG on that matter.
The Daydream support announcement came alongside news that Google had also developed a new reference design for a standalone VR headset, in partnership with Qualcomm. Third-party companies will be able to use these designs to build their own headsets – with both Lenovo and HTC already confirmed to be working on such devices.
