Google virtual reality viewer allows users to watch videos in 3-D
Device incorporates magnet, lenses and a cardboard box
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has seen the future, and it is littered with cardboard boxes.
At its Google I/O developer conference here last week, the search giant announced several programs aimed at putting its virtual reality viewer, called Cardboard, at the center of a growing online world in which people can use their smartphone and YouTube to watch videos rendered in 3-D.
Google introduced its virtual reality viewer — a cardboard box, with some lenses and a magnet, that looks a lot like a plastic View-Master toy — as a gift at last year’s I/O conference.
The idea was to create an inexpensive virtual reality device that allowed anyone with a smartphone to do things such as fly through a Google Earth map of Chicago or view personal pictures in three dimensions.
It is a comically simple contraption: A smartphone slips into the front so it sits just inches from a user’s eyes. Peering through a pair of cheap, plastic lenses renders the images on the phone’s screen in 3-D. It costs about $4.
Typical of the Google playbook, the company put Cardboard’s specifications online so hobbyists and manufacturers could build them.
In the year since, people have made viewers from foam, aluminum and walnut, and the Cardboard app was downloaded 1 million or so times.
“We wanted the viewer to be as dumb as possible and as cheap as possible because we basically wanted to open VR for everyone,” said David Coz, an engineer in Google’s Paris office who developed Cardboard.
At this year’s I/O, Google is doubling down on Cardboard with initiatives meant toexpandvirtualrealitytoasmanyphones as possible. First of these is a new software kit aimed at making it easier for developers to build Cardboard apps for iPhones. The company also redesigned the cardboard hardware so it is easier to fold and can now accommodate any smartphone, including larger-screen so-called phablets.
The Cardboard update is a modest offering compared with the product splashes of previous Google conferences, which have included a spherical entertainment system that was never released and Google Glass, the much-hyped and nowdiscontinued computerized eyewear that caused significant privacy concerns.
With Cardboard, Google’s virtual reality is decidedly low cost and low frills, but, as in other Google efforts, such as the free Android software that is the most widely used operating system in the world, it seems meant more to amass an audience than to make money.
Over the past year, Google has developed a 360-degree camera that looks like a chandelier rigged with 16 GoPro video recorders, and it has about a dozen of them filming sights around the world. When run through Google’s software and processors, the footage will turn into a virtual reality rendering that tries to mimic the view from a human eye. Google said it would allow people to start uploading virtual reality videos to YouTube this summer.
During a recent demonstration at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, Clay Bavor, vice president for product management for Google’s virtual reality