Stadia, a cloud gaming company owned by Google, is looking for new employees with a preference for virtual reality (VR) development experience.
Stadia is Google's cloud gaming service that runs games on powerful computers in the cloud and streams them to personal computers, laptops, and even smartphones. Its goal is to make any device feel like a high-end gaming computer.
Currently, Stadia does not offer a VR gaming experience, but considering that high-end VR games are limited to powerful gaming computers, resulting in a high barrier to entry, cloud gaming seems like a natural choice. If high-performance processing can be kept in the cloud and the results streamed to VR headsets connected to low-powered computers (or even standalone headsets), PC-based VR would be more accessible. Four recent job postings from Google indicate that the company is exploring this possibility.
The four positions are Employee Software Developer at Stadia, Developer Relations Manager, Client Software Development Kit Engineering Manager, Front-End Engineering Manager, and Stadia Discovery Engineering Manager. Interestingly, these roles cover both developer-facing features and user-facing features of the Stadia team, from developer services to game discovery.
Google is not the only company with ambitions for VR cloud gaming. NVIDIA has created its own VR cloud streaming infrastructure called CloudXR, but it is designed to be a foundation for others rather than a user-facing service. However, we may see the company leverage CloudXR to bring VR cloud gaming capabilities to its existing consumer-facing cloud gaming service, GeForce Now.
Similarly, Facebook launched its own cloud gaming service last year. Although VR games are not currently available, the project is led by former Oculus executives who clearly understand the potential of VR cloud gaming.
VR cloud streaming is definitely feasible, but the key bottleneck lies not in software or bandwidth, but in latency. As discussed in our previous article on the impact of 5G on VR and AR, the true bottleneck for widespread use of such services is the proliferation of edge computing infrastructure.