Image credit: RYAN YOUNG FOR WIRED
A FEW MINUTES after Google CEO Sundar Pichai finished speaking to the crowd at a Google developer conference one sunny June morning in 2014, Jon Wiley made his way over to a newly unveiled booth inside San Francisco’s Moscone conference center, where the event was being held. He’d been struck by something near the end of Pichai’s remarks. Pichai had mentioned, almost in passing, that everyone in the audience would be getting something called Cardboard. It had something to do with virtual reality.
This was the first Wiley had heard of the project, or anything having to do with Google and VR. You might think he’d get some early notice, since he’s one of the company’s most celebrated and long-tenured designers, perhaps the person most responsible for the Overall Google Aesthetic. But you’d be wrong. So he waded through the scrum at the Cardboard booth, grabbed a headset, and tried a few demos. He doesn’t remember now why he had a friend take a video, but he’s glad that he did. After a few minutes, he walked away and kept doing what he was actually at I/O to do: extol the virtues of Google’s new material design guidelines. But Wiley couldn’t stop thinking about Cardboard.
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Jon Wiley, Google’s director of immersive design.
Image credit: RYAN YOUNG FOR WIRED
For the several years leading up to this, Wiley’s job had been designing the company’s search products, like voice search and the iconic Omnibox. One thing he always loved was how well search hid its underlying complexity: A simple, straightforward interface on top of massively complex computer science and engineering. Something about Cardboard struck him the same way. “When you look at Cardboard, it’s very unassuming,” he says. “I mean, it’s literally made of cardboard!” But having played around with VR during its last almost-moment in the ’90s, he knew how complex the system really was. His mind raced with the design possibilities.
A few months after the I/O conference, a fledgling group of VR junkies within Google approached Wiley and asked if he wanted to work with them on the side. VR tech was improving fast, but no one was really thinking through how a virtual world should actually look and feel. Maybe it could be his 20-percent project, that infamous Google-sanctioned side hustle. Wiley spent a weekend thinking it over and said no. He wanted to do it full time. In early 2015 he became Google’s director of immersive design and set about figuring out how billions of people will use VR both now and in the decades to come.
After years at the helm of one of Google’s most mature products, Wiley is now working on one of its newest and most experimental. There are few agreed-upon rules or norms for VR, at least other than “don’t make people puke.” And everything that works on paper looks, well, flat in this immersive new place. So Wiley has hired architects and sculptors alongside his engineers. Together, the team has worked to rid themselves of everything they know in order to figure out the true way forward. If they get it right, Google’s VR designers are in a position to help usher in the most immersive, natural, human version of computing ever conceived.
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Source: Wired