When it comes to VR efforts from Google, we pretty much only have Cardboard, which in reality is more like a holder for your smartphone in which specially designed apps will give users the virtual reality experience. It is more similar to Samsung’s Gear VR design rather than the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR.
However could it be possible that Google might be considering building their own virtual reality hardware? According to the folks at Road to VR, it seems that they have stumbled across several VR-related jobs at Google, which seems to suggest that Google building their own hardware is a possibility.
The jobs in question calls for a Hardware Engineering Technical Lead Manager and a PCB Layout Engineer. The original listings mentioned virtual reality, but Google has since replaced it with “consumer hardware”. Either the mention of VR was done in error, or maybe Google just didn’t want to give too much away.
If you wanted more proof, Vine’s boss Jason Toff recently left the company and according to his tweet, will be making his way to Google to work on VR. What exactly this entails remains to be seen, but Google’s interest in the technology is more than just a passing one, and hopefully we’ll have more details soon, maybe at Google I/O later this year.