Google XR glasses usher in a key layout: waving a check to recruit the HTC team and pave the way for return

HTC also announced simultaneously that under the agreement, Google will pay US$250 million. In addition to bringing in HTC’s XR R&D team members, Google will also obtain a non-exclusive license to HTC’s XR intellectual property.

Some media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that the "some personnel" mentioned in Google's announcement refer to about one-third of the HTCXR team, mainly in management positions. Before the official announcement of the transaction, Google had been interviewing people for 3 to 4 months to select people who were suitable for the company.

This situation also made the industry lament that it was like a repeat of the transaction in 2017.

In 2017, Google reached an agreement with HTC and spent US$1.1 billion to acquire "approximately 2,000 HTC Pixel mobile phone business team members" and related intellectual property licenses.

The sale of the team does not mean that HTC will give up its XR business.

According to reports, HTC Chairman Wang Xuehong issued an internal letter on Thursday, emphasizing that it will continue to build the VIVE brand and focus on high value-added XR products. Wang Xuehong also said that this cooperation with Google is expected to have a profound impact on the global XR market, promote the maturity of the AndroidXR system, and enhance the overall market competitiveness.

The XR market finally welcomes the return of Google

Although when talking about XR headsets at the moment, we mainly talk about Apple’s VisionPro, Meta’s Quest, and ByteDance’s Pico, etc., but Google is indeed the elder in this industry and one of the first technology giants to fail.

As early as 2012, Google publicly demonstrated the market-beating AR glasses Google Glass (subsequently priced as high as $1,500!), and subsequently released the low-cost VR glasses platform Google Cardboard/Daydream in 2014 and 2016. In the end, they all sadly exited the market due to price, lack of applications, poor market acceptance and other reasons.

Therefore, in the following years, Google mostly sat back and watched the ups and downs of the XR market.

At the end of December last year, as Google gained a foothold in the AI ​​field, the company raised the banner of "AndroidXR" and announced that it would launch AR and AI glasses products with Samsung, Qualcomm, Magic Leap and other manufacturers, and released renderings of the prototype system.