The technology combines computer vision, machine learning, and real-time compression to achieve what Google calls “near-perfect” millimeter-level head tracking at 60 frames per second. While pricing hasn’t been announced, the complexity of the hardware suggests this won’t be showing up in home offices anytime soon – think more corporate conference rooms than kitchen table video calls.
Key points 🗝️
- Available Now: ❌ (late 2025)
- Where: Enterprise customers first
- Cost: TBD (probably expensive)
And that’s not even close to everything
You might think that six major new tool releases would already be a lot, but then you wouldn’t be Google. As cool as they are, those six tools barely scratch the surface of the 100 things that Google announced at the I/O conference last week.
And when I say one hundred, I’m not exaggerating. Google published a blog post about it and the title of the post is literally “100 things we announced at I/O.” 2
Here are a few of the other major announcements:
- Real-time speech translation in Google Meet that preserves your voice tone and expressions
- Android XR smart glasses with Samsung partnership and Gemini integration
- NotebookLM Video Overviews that turn documents into narrated video summaries
- Three new Gemini model variants: 2.5 Flash, Gemma 3n, and specialized models for medicine (MedGemma) and sign language (SignGemma)
- Fully agentic Google Colab that fixes code errors automatically
- Multiple developer tools: Stitch for UI generation, Journeys for app testing, Version Upgrade Agent for dependency updates
- Lyria 2 music generation with real-time composition capabilities
- Firebase Studio improvements with Figma import support
- Project Mariner is a browser agent that navigates websites and completes complex tasks for you
If your head is spinning trying to keep track of all this, you’re not alone.
The overlap problem
I’m not an expert on the inner workings of Google. Nor do I have a flowchart that shows Google’s various divisions that ultimately connect up to CEO Sundar Pichai.
But from an outsider’s perspective, it feels like the company is a bunch of loosely connected silos that have the Google brand name slapped onto them but in practice are doing their own thing. Then, whenever they “build something cool,” they send it up the pipeline and the Google C-Suite tries to make it fit into the company vision somehow.
Again, I’m not saying this is how it actually works. This is just how it comes across to me, as an outside observer.
Why do I say that?
Because many of the tools overlap with each other and it comes across as if Google is just playing a game of product dart throwing to see which darts will stick.
Take coding assistants, for example.
Jules is Google’s new autonomous coding agent that I just talked about earlier. But! They also have Gemini Code Assist, Google Colab, AI Studio, and Firebase for building apps.
How many different ways do we need to ask AI to write code for us?
Or consider the search experience confusion: the new AI Mode lets you chat with Google while browsing. But don’t mix that up with Gemini in Chrome, which also lets you ask AI questions while browsing. And definitely don’t confuse either of those with Search Live (part of Project Astra), which lets you chat with Search about what your phone camera sees.
If you can make sense of all that, you deserve a trophy from Mr. Pichai.
The bigger picture
What makes this whole situation even more wild is that Google is currently facing a major antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. government. 3 Uncle Sam’s argument is that Google has become too dominant over web search, is stifling competition, and needs to be broken up.
It makes you wonder if this volcano eruption of AI tools is some kind of unconventional legal tactic to prove that they’re not focused on any one thing. It’s a fascinating contradiction when you think about it. They have been accused of being too focused on search dominance so they respond by appearing completely unfocused in their product strategy.
Don’t get me wrong – the individual tools are genuinely impressive. Real-time speech translation that preserves your voice? AI that can autonomously fix your code? Video calls that make people appear three-dimensional? Any one of these would have been headline news just a few years ago.
But when you release everything at once in a tsunami of announcements, even breakthrough technology gets lost in the noise.
Maybe this scatter-shot approach will work for Google, though. Maybe having teams work independently and launch rapidly is exactly how you stay ahead in the AI race. Well, as the old saying goes: “only time will tell.”
Have you been following along with Google’s latest AI releases? Which tool are you most excited to try? Which of the ones I mentioned here are new to you? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to get your take.
