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Google was among the first to herald the advent of mobile VR, but that daydream is slowly coming to an end. After the company halted the Cardboard SDK development and open-sourced it in 2019, it has now finally stopped selling the Cardboard hardware altogether in its online store.
Long before Google introduced Daydream and subsequently left it dead in the water, the company created the Cardboard platform. You can use the carton headsets as an ultra-low-budget entry to VR to this day, and they're compatible with almost any regularly shaped phone on the market. Google has now open-sourced the underlying VR SDK which will allow interested developers to create their own VR experiences on Cardboard viewers and improve and enhance the project as they see fit.
To make way for the new products announced at today's event, Google has removed several items from their online store. Most notable is the removal of the Nexus 5X and 6P, Google's smartphone lineup from last year, now replaced by the Pixel devices. Also gone from the virtual shelves is the NVIDIA Shield console, still arguably the best Android TV device on the market. The Mattel View-Master VR Starter Pack and Goggle Tech C1-Glass VR Viewer are both removed as well, now that Daydream is the focus of Google's VR efforts. Finally, the Dell Chromebook 13 is gone.
One of the core principles of video games is that they're aspirational: we beat the invincible bad guy and drive hovercraft race cars in lavish fantasy worlds because we can't ever do it in real life. Video games are now so amazing that they're intersecting with the real world in the form of VR, but our aspirations have softened a bit as we've gotten older - now some of those impossible dreams include "owning a really nice house." FOX Sports VR has embraced the death of the American dream by virtualizing that nice house and letting you watch football in it.
Hecorat, the developer behind some cool apps we love like AZ Screen Recorder and EZ Package Disabler, has released a new app on the Play Store and this one solves an existential problem for all virtual reality fans who own Samsung's Gear VR but also want to try Cardboard apps and games: it lets them do exactly that which Samsung had tried its darndest to forbid.
So you don't live in Australia and couldn't get a free Cardboard viewer from that Optus giveaway a couple of days ago. Maybe you live in the US — actually our Analytics tell us that a nice majority of you do — and you'd like a chance to get your free VR viewer nonetheless. Maybe you're a fan of Conan O'Brien and maybe you've missed that Cardboard giveaway that he did last year. Now's your chance to pounce on your coveted freebie and grab it.
Troye Sivan is a popular singer, actor, and YouTuber in Australia. Regardless of whether or not you know all his songs and the fact that he played young James Howlett in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, there's a techie reason you might be interested in this giveaway that he's doing with Australian carrier Optus.
Fans of the burgeoning art of 360-degree short-form storytelling have probably been enamored by Google's Spotlight Stories, a series of videos designed to highlight the narrative potential of the VR format. The latest one is Pearl, a sort of extended animated music video about a man, his daughter, and the beat-up hatchback car that they share over about 20 years. The short is directed by Patrick Osbourne, and the original song "No Wrong Way Home" was written by Alexis Harte and JJ Weisler and performed by Nicki Bluhm and Kelley Stoltz.
So you've yet to snag a free Google Cardboard VR headset from a trade show. Or a Star Wars promotion. Or a copy of the New York Times, or a late-night talk show host, or even a freakin' porn website. And even when Google started selling Cardboard for actual money, they only did it in the US and not [your country here]. Don't worry: if you lack the skills and/or materials to build one of the ultra-cheap headsets, you can now buy one in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, or Germany.
360-degree photos are cool, and they're gaining popularity quickly, but at the moment there's no easy way to get them into web and app content. Google aims to fix that with VR View, a new open-source system for easily embedding 360-degree photos and videos onto web pages and apps, both on Android and iOS. The new system is open source, allowing for (relatively) simple adaptation into a variety of situations. Google made the announcement on its Developers blog.
It seems like everyone wants to grab a slice of the virtual reality action, and LG is not one to get left behind. One of the accessories (or "friends," as LG calls them) that are pairable with the new G5 is the LG 360 VR — LG's own take on a VR headset.
MWC 2016 is set to begin in just two days, and Alcatel has now officially unveiled its two new flagships: the OneTouch Idol 4 and the OneTouch Idol 4S. Both phones show off the best Alcatel has to offer — with their premium build and latest generation specs — but one of the more unexpected features of the new OneTouch Idols may actually be the packaging of the phones. This might not be entirely new to most of our readers, but the box in which both the Idol 4 and Idol 4S come in doubles as a virtual reality headset.
Alcatel's unannounced Idol 4S and Idol 4 leaked via its own website recently, but it's not just the phones that are important this time; the packaging is also of note. According to Evan "@evleaks" Blass at Venture Beat, the Idol 4S packaging will double as a Google Cardboard viewer.
In horror movies, things leap out at you. The same is true with scary books. Take Goosebumps. A 90s kid could not walk through a library, book store, yard sale, or a box of hand-me-downs with at least one novel in the series jumping out at them. And like a horde of zombies, those books knew there was strength in numbers. It doesn't matter how many R.L. Stine actually created, that number is half as much as what it felt like he did.
CES always seems to have at least one major trend at the trade show, and this year's hot ticket is virtual reality. With a new HTC Vive headset, the announcement of the Oculus Rift's pricey consumer model, and all manner of smaller announcements, it's safe to say that VR is the belle of the ball on the show floor. But all of them have one thing in common: you can't fit them in a pocket. Even Google's super-cheap Cardboard system is about the size of a dSLR camera when assembled. Case maker Speck thinks it's solved that problem with a new design, which is about the same size as a phone.
There's a surprisingly wide variety of content available for Google's dirt-cheap Cardboard VR system, but not many ways for end users to make use of it for their personal media. Enter Cardboard Camera, a new Google app that allows you to take a series of photos and automatically format them for the stereoscopic, 360-degree headset. (You don't need the headset to take the photos, but you'll need one to view the results in VR.) The app even records a little of the ambient sound in the area while you're taking all the necessary photos, so you can create a complete scene.
The Force awakens on December 18th, but the Force of Disney's marketing has awakened long before that. We're already being bombarded with Star Wars figurines and collectibles and toys and miscellaneous items in every online or retail store we visit. And here's one more thing you want to add to your list of coveted Star Wars items: a themed Google Cardboard unit.
I don't think anyone realized just how widespread Google's Cardboard "virtual reality" standard would become when it was first announced. And as neat as some of the games and apps that use Cardboard are, it's hard to escape the fact that the headsets are, well, made of cardboard. If you'd like something more sturdy (without having to buy a new LG phone), you can grab one of Mattel's revitalized View-Master VR toys. The original price was a bit steep at thirty bucks, but today Amazon and Wal-Mart are selling them for $19.97, a little closer to impulse buy range and pretty decent stocking-stuffers to boot.