Race to build VR cameras escalates as Google teams with IMAX and Yi Technology on new rigs
Google is working with new camera manufacturers IMAX and Yi Technology to ramp up production — One of the most impressive things Google unveiled at its developers conference last May was an odd, disc-shaped gadget called the Odyssey.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 announcement sits at the start of a short, sharp arc in Google's VR capture strategy. A year earlier, Google had redesigned Cardboard for larger phones and partnered with GoPro on a 16-camera 360-degree recorder — an approach that outsourced the actual rig-building. Teaming with IMAX and Yi Technology escalates that model: instead of one accessory partner, Google is lining up a cinema-brand and a Xiaomi-backed camera maker to industrialize high-end capture.
The follow-through came fast and then reversed. Yi shipped the $17,000 17-camera Yi Halo stereoscopic 8K rig within a year, but by 2017 Google was already pivoting to the cheaper VR180 half-sphere standard with Yi, Lenovo, and LG — and by 2018 IMAX canceled its Google co-developed VR camera entirely, with sources citing Google's shift toward AR.
First-order effects
- Yi Technology gains a flagship reference design beyond its Xiaomi-backed consumer camera line, moving upmarket into professional VR capture, while IMAX extends its theater brand into production hardware built to its imaging standards.
- GoPro's earlier 16-camera Google collaboration loses its exclusivity as a capture partner — Google now runs parallel rig programs with two additional manufacturers.
Second-order effects
- The multi-partner push compresses the market for high-end VR rigs: Yi's Halo lands at $17K a year later, forcing price and spec competition into what was previously bespoke, per-production camera work.
- Cheaper pro-grade capture feeds YouTube's VR content pipeline, which in turn pushes Google to define formats itself — the VR180 standard arrives months later as a lower-cost alternative to full 360-degree shooting.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that emerges is platform owners setting capture standards rather than building cameras: when flagship partner rigs prove too expensive or slow, Google redefines the format (VR180) and ultimately exits the IMAX project altogether as its attention moves to AR.
- For hardware partners like IMAX and Yi, co-development with a platform company is a bet whose payoff depends on that platform's priorities holding still — a structural risk for anyone building specialized hardware around someone else's roadmap.
The trend: VR capture is consolidating around platform-defined formats and cheap standardized rigs, with big-platform partners like Google abandoning bespoke flagship hardware whenever the economics or strategic focus shift.