Xiaomi has launched a number of new products lately, including a new smartphone and a couple of notebooks powered by Windows 10, marking the company’s entrance into the PC market. However, if the latest reports turn out to be accurate, Xiaomi may also join the mobile virtual reality segment with a brand new product powered by Google Daydream, as early as August 4.
Xiaomi has been previously rumored to have an interest in creating its own VR headset for mobile, and in fact, the company’s general manager, Tang Mu, eventually confirmed that Xiaomi is indeed stepping into the mobile virtual reality segment to offer MIUI users a smooth VR experience. A few days back, rumors had it that the first Xiaomi VR headset will be unveiled on August 1st. Evidently this hasn’t come to pass, but the good news is that the rumors don’t seem to have been off by a large margin. Instead and according to a new post on the Chinese social network Weibo originating from Xiaomi, the company is set to unveil its VR headset in just a couple of days from now, on the 4th day of August. Although there are no concrete details regarding pricing and availability, the Xiaomi VR headset will be based on Google’s own Daydream platform for mobile VR, which was officially introduced earlier this year at Google I/O. However, because Google Daydream is part of the Android 7 Nougat operating system, there is a possibility that Xiaomi’s VR headset will hit the shelves only after Google launches Android Nougat to the general public, which may happen by the end of this week, according to previous rumors.
Google Daydream is baked into the Android operating system and as such, Xiaomi’s VR headset will most likely be compatible only with smartphones running Android 7 Nougat. On the other hand, Xiaomi hasn’t really been one of the fastest smartphone makers when it comes to deploying new software updates, so hopefully the story will be different with Android 7 Nougat. It’s good to know that Xiaomi already confirmed its plans to develop a new proprietary MIUI user interface based on the Android 7.0 Nougat source code, but as yet there’s no official word on the OS’ release.