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On the Significance of Google's New Cardboard: An Idea Worth Recycling
Last week at Google I/O, the company introduced Cardboard, its cheap-and-cheerful (it's made of cardboard, after all) approach to nearly instant VR viewing. It's no Oculus Rift — lacking the Rift's connection to a powerful backend PC, it can't do the same heavy lifting. In fact, it looks sort of like a prank, and the announcement at I/O that everyone at the conference would be getting "a piece of cardboard" drew a lot of chuckles. Gigaom argues that it's nonetheless extremely valuable, because it makes immersive viewing easy and cheap for anyone with a fairly capable smartphone — a pretty satisfying experience in itself, and a good taste of what even higher-end viewers can bring. "In addition to the Cardboard app," writes an anonymous reader, "Google has pushed out an updated version of Google Maps which includes a VR mode for Street View." And if you weren't blessed with an I/O pass, and aren't sure about your skills cutting one out of a pizza box, note that you can buy a kit for about $25, including the RF tag that will tell a phone to fire up the Cardboard app. (The linked article says an aluminum version is in the works from at least one company; I'd like to see one in corrugated plastic — strong but light — and with connection points for a headstrap.) If you've made something similar (or would like to), what would you improve in the design or feature set? (Look soon for a video introduction to Cardboard with Google VP Clay Bavor, too.)
I see there's two lenses, but still, are people really able to focus on a display which is 3cm away from their eyes?
Are there any holders for 7 inch tablets? My tablet has much better graphics and way more storage than my phone.
Expensive hardware makes it hard to consume googles products. So they force the industry to lower the price by doing stuff like this. There's a lot not to love about googles spy empire, but there is at least some good that comes out of it. I've no doubt that I'll be using a cad program in VR and hand gestures in the near future thanks to Google.
I remember back in the 1970's, the X-Ray crystalography researchers at my university would burn up lots of compute time (on an IBM 360/65, 1 MIPS, 4 mega-bytes of core) computing stereo images that were rendered by writing a mag tape that was then taken to a CalComp pen plotter. Two images, about 8 x 8 inches, were plotted, and then they would lay them on a table and use an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of cardboard from a used-up paper tablet to make a baffle between their eyes.
Very likely, definitely doesn't advertise compatibility with anything else, and actually includes 4 slightly different shells to snap different iphone and ipod touch devices to the viewer unit, so clearly tolerances are a little fiddly even within Apple's line.
If anyone is actually considering it, I'd imagine that bodging one of the 'shells' into something that fits a different phone wouldn't be too hard; and you get 4 tries. The optics would still presumably cut the edges off your view of the screen, though, since I assume that they were set to maximize the amount of screen, and minimize the amount of darkened-tube-periphery, for iphone screen sizes.
This is a great use for the (otherwise excessively) high-resolution cellphone displays such as Apple's "retina".
Also: This is a strong argument for putting TWO cameras on a cellphone's backside - separated by about the typical distance between a person's eyes and equally speced relative to the centerline of the phone. That would enable the formation of a stereoscopic augmented reality display showing the correct image of the background. (It would also enable taking stereoptic pictures.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way