Expand? The design constraints seem very dissimilar:
- weight is important, form factor isn't
- any app is either doing 3d rendering or integrated into a windowing system ala a trad desktop
- they are not constantly-on, they are used for long periods with breaks
- they are limited by processing power not by UX
- the peripherals are very complex - to the extent of complex requiring access to hand and/or controller movement at a very fine level
If anything they are similar to laptops, but overall they are their own device class.
If "similar to mobile phones" means "similar chips and batteries"... sure, but so are laptops build after 2020, besides that I don't quite understand the comparison.
> You’re not a mega company
Right, I'm asking why Steam, HTC and Meta did this, which are in the top <x> tech companies by market cap and spend billions on this stuff. Totally get why a small VR device dev would not do this.
> OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running
Right, except that I am not saying one should build a kernel, and webgl, cuda, etc are kernel dependant not OS dependant
> assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now
I am unaware of android-specific hardware features to date (linux specific, maybe, but not android) -- you can literally add any bootloader and load a linux kernel and get drivers running on most phones even, w/o android, and where "android" is necessary it's simply an artifact of the company maintaining the phone having build the drivers into their distro and not released them separately.
> You also don’t want to order a million units up front.
Again, seems unrelated, I'm talking about building the VR hardware i.e. not order off the shelf and white label (unless your claim here is that meta, htc, steam etc are doing white labeling, which doesn't seem to be the case)
Right, I'm saying for a VR devices, no a mobile phone. It makes perfect sense why android would be the choice for a mobile phone. I'm rather confused what you are replying to.
If anything they are similar to laptops, but overall they are their own device class.
If "similar to mobile phones" means "similar chips and batteries"... sure, but so are laptops build after 2020, besides that I don't quite understand the comparison.