At its developer conference in May, Google is expected to talk a lot about its plans for tailoring Android smartphones to virtual reality. But make no mistake: for Google, VR isn’t the ultimate prize—augmented reality is.
Google leaders including CEO Sundar Pichai and Clay Bavor, who heads a newly formed VR unit at Google, have privately said that augmented, or “mixed,” reality, in which digital information and images are overlaid or next to a person’s view of the real world, is going to be a much bigger market than VR in the long run, according to several people at the company and elsewhere. (Think “Terminator” vision.)