Earlier this year Oculus announced support for Chromecast around the same time Google’s Daydream revealed it too would be adding the feature.
In case you are unfamiliar, Chromecast is a feature from Google included in many recent televisions that makes it easy to broadcast to the TV from phones, apps and computers.
If your TV doesn’t have the feature, you can add it with a $35 dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. With VR, this feature can turn solitary experiences into social ones by letting people outside VR see into the virtual world. And just like mobile VR itself, it is very convenient because the feature works wirelessly.It’s taken a while for me to get around to testing casting for both Gear VR and Daydream View, but it turns out the Oculus implementation is lacking while the Daydream version of the feature is practically a must-have addition to the platform. This is to be expected given it is Google’s technology, but the difference also highlights a potential limit to how far Facebook can take VR while building on another company’s platform.
As an example of this gap, this week I wanted to play the role-playing game The Well with my kid. This is a beautiful Oculus-funded title that perfectly represents the depth of Facebook’s investments into quality content. It also seemed like a great game to enjoy this way. My daughter could tell me where to go in the virtual world and advise me how to fight the many creatures I’d encounter, and I could share the headset with her for a few brief glimpses into that world.
Unfortunately, the moment I tried turning the feature on…The post Daydream’s Chromecast support leaves Oculus VR in the dust appeared first on FeedBox.