[APPLAUSE]

Good morning, everyone.

It's great to see so many people fired up

about VR here at 9:00 AM.

Thanks for being here, yeah.

I'm Clay Bavor, I lead the VR team at Google.

I'm also pretty fired up about VR.

Pro tip for the people in the back,

I saw some pretty intense tans, sunburns yesterday.

The sun comes in this way, so people

on the border right there, you might

want to come down unless you want a great tan.

So hopefully caught the keynote yesterday about Daydream,

and that's what today is about.

We're going to go a lot deeper on all of the components of it.

But before we do that, I wanted to talk just briefly about VR

and why it's important to us.

And if I can just do a quick poll, how many people have been

in a VR system where you've had that moment of like,

oh my god I'm there, I'm somewhere else.

I love this.

This is like the highest ratio of any talk I've given,

so that's great.

So you know what this is about, you

know what I'm talking about.

Now for people who haven't, for folks on the Livestream,

there's no substitute for actually

being in one of these demo rooms, in one of these systems.

But I want to walk you through an experience

that we share with a lot of people

who are seeing VR for the first time in one of our labs.

And it starts here, poolside And it's

kind of this abstract pool, there's

like a white grid for the ground.

And you look around, and you look to your right,

and there is a diving board.

And then you look up and there's another diving board.

And you know where this is going.

So that diving board is 150 feet tall, 50 meters or so.

And we teleport you up there, and what happens

next is pretty interesting.

People immediately lower their center of gravity,

they crouch down.

Some reach for a hand railing that's not actually there.

And we ask people to walk to the edge,

and look over, and step off.

And it looks really scary even from here.

I'm imagining from there it looks scarier.

And most people can't step off, they can't do it.

Even I have a hard time, knowing that I'm just in, like,

a room in Mountain View.

And so what's happening here?

Now for those of you who are deep into VR,

you know what this is about, it's presence.

And presence is the VR jargon for that feeling

that you're really somewhere else.

And it happens when all of your different senses--

sight, sound, how you're moving your body,

proprioception, your vestibular system, all line up and agree.

And your brain just says, yep, I'm there.

And it's how VR can make you feel like you're experiencing

something directly.

And that's pretty important to us at Google.

That's because we've always cared about information,

organizing it, making it useful and accessible.

But people think of information as, like, numbers and words,

sentences, and so on.

But experience, in many cases, is the most direct form

of information.

And if you think about it, there's

a world of difference between reading some words

and sentences, a book about Paris,

and then actually visiting Paris,

and walking the streets yourself,

and actually being there.

And so we think that VR has the potential

to connect people with this kind of information,

experiential information, in a pretty profound way.

We just think VR is amazing.

We want to bring it to the world and make it for everyone.

And our next step in that is Daydream,

and we talked about Daydream yesterday.

If you didn't catch the session yesterday,

I just wanted to roll a quick video which we shared yesterday

really highlighting most of all the Daydream controller,

but it'll give you a flavor for how this all comes together.

Can we roll the video?

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[END PLAYBACK]

For some reason yesterday, people

were especially excited about flipping pancakes in VR.

So yeah, that's one of the things you'll

be able to do in Daydream.

So daydream has three parts to it.

And we're going to go into a number of these today

in a lot more detail.

First, our VR optimized smartphones,

what we call Daydream ready smartphones that

have very high specifications, and displays,

and sensors, and the SOC, the processor in it.

And also VR optimizations, which we've made as part of Android N

at really all levels of the stack.

The second part is a reference design

for headsets and controllers, a really comfortable VR

viewer, and a powerful but expressive controller.

And then finally, apps, including Google Play,

to make it really easy for users to discover, buy, find,

and install VR apps.

So to get us started going one level deeper on this,

I'd like to turn it over to Nathan Martz who

leads our developer products.

Nathan.

NATHAN MARTZ: Thanks, Clay.

I have to say it is so exciting to be here today.

You know, one of my earliest memories

was the night my dad came home with our first computer.

It was an Atari 800 XL-- yeah, there you go.

48 kilobytes bytes of RAM, support

for upper and lowercase characters, pretty awesome.

But the thing I loved most about it

was the fact that when you put in the cartridge

and turned it on, this entire world sprang into existence

inside the computer.

And for five-year-old Nathan, that was as good as it got.

It's amazing that today we have technology that's so advanced,

that's so powerful, it doesn't just

have great graphics or realistic sound effects,

it can actually make you feel like you're physically

present in another world.

That is phenomenal.

And the fact that you can do all of this on a computer

small enough that it fits in your pocket is just incredible.

We live in amazing times.

But of course, creating presence on a smartphone is easier

said than done.

Of course, just hitting the 20 millisecond motion

to photon latency bar, getting below that,

which is the gold standard of VR, doing that on a phone

is hard.

But we have a more fundamental problem, I think,

which is that we're all taking devices that run on batteries

and trying to create experiences for them that feel just as

compelling as experiences for computers

that plug into your front neighborhood power plant.

And closing that gap is fundamentally difficult.

So the way we solved that with Daydream

is through hardware and software designed in concert

with one another.

We've tried to make sure that every facet of the platform

supports every other.

Today I'm going to walk you through the hardware

and software that makes that possible.

And the developer tools that we're

going to be providing that help you

take advantage of all of it.

Of course for us, the foundation of Daydream

is the phone itself.

And great VR experiences require great hardware.

You have to have all of the right parts

to ensure a high quality, low latency experience.

So we've ensured that every Daydream phone has

a low persistence display to make

sure there's no ghosting or unnecessary lag coming

from the display itself.

We have a high quality SOC which will let all of you

create amazing experiences and render them at 60 frames

a second.

And of course, the sensors in the phone are super critical.

We've made sure that they're all high performance, high quality,

low latency sensors so that there's

a direct connection between what you do in the real world

and what you see in the virtual world.

Now it's not actually a single phone for Daydream,

it's a standard for phones called Daydream ready.

And the great thing about the standard

is that for developers, it gives you a platform that you

can feel confident about.

You know that if you're building for the Daydream ready spec,

any Daydream phone will run your app well.

And it gives consumers confidence

that when they buy a Daydream app,

it'll run well on any phone they have

as long as it's Daydream ready.

Now of course, great hardware doesn't just

give you a sense of presence, it requires great software

as well.

Which is why we've work very closely with the Android team

on Android N and its VR mode.

We've worked to make sure that Android is just

as good as a great OS for VR.

And there's a few key components that we've

made available to developers.

The first of those is a low latency support for Android N.

And that's the foundation for VR and for presence.

We have a sustained performance mode which manages the hardware

and makes sure that when users decide to get in VR

they can stay in VR as long as they want.

We have high quality head tracking algorithms

that fuse all of the data from the sensors in the phone

and track your head movement.

So that looking around in the virtual world

is just as natural as it is in the real world.

But for all of this, we know that your phone is still

fundamentally your phone.

And you're going to get calls, and you're

going to get text messages.

So we've made sure to port key components of the Android UI

into VR.

So that if you get a call or get a text message,

we render it for you in stereo, and you

can decide whether you want to stay in VR

or leave to act on that notification.

Now if you take a Daydream phone running Android N,

and you combine it with a viewer,

you get an incredible sense of presence.

You feel like you're somewhere else.

But to a certain extent, all you can do is look around.

I spent much of my career as a game developer,

and I developed a deep respect for the power of interactivity.

You know, when you think about the things we learn really

early in life, in infancy, the first thing

we learn is how to look around.

And then we learn how to use our hands.

We learn how to reach out and touch the world.

We learn about our heads and our hands together.

In Daydream, we saw an opportunity

to provide access to both heads and hands in VR.

We did that through the creation of the Daydream controller.

This controller is simple enough that anyone

can use it even while they're in VR

and can't actually see their hands.

But we've also made it expressive enough

that developers can use it to create

rich, amazing interactions.

It's precise enough that you can use it as a laser pointer,

but it's also responsive enough to swing it

like a tennis racket.

We've added a clickable touch pad

so you can both grab and interact with virtual objects

as well as effortlessly browse a media collection.

There's an App button, which is totally under the developers'