Skip to main content

Google Updates Its Cardboard VR App, Launches SDKs For Android And Unity


Google Cardboard was the big surprise of this year’s Google I/O, and Google today announced that more than 500,000 of these extremely minimalist, phone-based virtual reality viewers have shipped since then. The early cardboard app was a lot of fun, but over the last few months, it felt like development had stalled a bit. Today, however, the company is launching an update to the cardboard app and new SDKs. It’s also showcasing some of the apps that developers have created over the last few months.

These apps now also have their own dedicated collection page in Google Play and range from a Paul McCartney performance video to a 360-degree view of the Lord Of the Ring’s Shire movie set in New Zealand, with a couple of games and a Volvo-sponsored driving app thrown in for good measure.

The open-source Cardboard viewer itself isn’t seeing any changes, but Google is introducing new SDKs for Android and the Unity game engine today that will make it even easier for developers to create new apps. The Android SDK handles everything from lens-distortion correction to head tracking and the rendering for developers who want to write their own OpenGL apps. Unity developers, on the other hand, can now install the Cardboard SDK and create their own VR project from scratch or adapt existing 3D apps for VR. The Unity SDK is also integrated with the Android SDK.

All of this, Google’s product manager for Cardboard Andrew Nartker writes in today’s announcement, ensures that developers don’t have to worry about the technical details of getting their apps to work on Cardboard.

“It’s important to get these things right, but they can suck up all your time — time you’d rather spend on gameplay or graphics,” he writes. “The SDKs simplify common VR development tasks so you can focus on your awesome, immersive app. And with both Android and Unity support, you can use the tools you already know and love.”

For those who want to build their own Cardboard viewers (either privately or commercially), Google is also releasing a number of new specs today that were designed for specific cutting tools. One issue with custom viewers has always been that the Cardboard SDK didn’t allow you to provide the exact specs for your components. The SDK will soon feature a calibration tool that allows builders to fine-tune things like their viewer’s base and focal length so the app can automatically adjust to these different viewers.

Google is clearly taking VR seriously. Cardboard is obviously just a first step and it’s no Occulus Rift. But the company is actively hiring developers for this project. Chances are, however, that many of them will also work on whatever Google is planning next in the virtual reality space. It’s clear, though, that what was once a 20 percent project is now becoming a 100 percent effort.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
1 comment
Read more

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th
Post a Comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a
Post a Comment
Read more