Google Doodles are remarkably emblematic of the company’s whimsical nature and serve as an important, perpetual marker of an event or person. Today’s animation does both, celebrating the 1913 release of director George Méliès’ masterpiece The Conquest of the Pole. Google appropriately marked the occasion with its first-ever VR-enabled and 360° video Doodle.
It’s a little over two years since Motorola launched Spotlight Player, an app that could be used to view a 360-degree interactive animation. Initially limited to the Moto X before being rolled out to other Android devices, you move your smartphone up, down, left and right to choose which part of the scene to view – and can also view through Google Cardboard.
Google held onto the team when it sold Motorola to Lenovo, and it has now launched Special Delivery, a holiday-themed Spotlight Story from Aardman Animations, the creators of Wallace & Gromit. While you have to pay for some stories, this one is free as a holiday gift from Google …
ATP head Regina Dugan with some of her 100-strong team
Google’s mobile-focused research group, Advanced Technology and Projects (ATP), gives projects a maximum of two years’ work before they are killed, adopted as official Google products or sold to outside companies, reports the WSJ.
The deadline was created by former DARPA head Regina Dugan in an attempt to counter the normal tendency of companies to grow less nimble and more bureaucratic as they grow in size, said Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Product cycles slow down as a company gets larger. All of us believe we could execute faster […]
We like this model because it puts pressure on people to perform and do relevant things or stop. I’ve spent an awful lot of time on projects that never end and products that would never ship.
The company is ruthless about killing off projects which don’t deliver notable results, said Dugan, who was hired by Google in 2012, and it doesn’t always let them run as long as two years …
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Motorola and Google may have officially split up, however the search giant has retained the interactive short film brand known as Spotlight Stories that was featured on the Moto X and Moto G smartphones. This newer filmmaking technology pushes stories from the big screens of the theater to a person’s mobile device and features engaging cues that impact the way the story told and heard. For example, if a helicopter were to follow a vehicle as part of a car chase, a viewer would be able to lift their phone upward to get a closer look at the iron bird in hot pursuit.