The Google Cardboard is a cost-efficient, yet innovative way to bring Virtual Reality to the masses. Users can fold their own cardboard headset, or they can also buy from a selection of headsets niftily created and showcased from Google’s very own website.
Google has definitely made giant strides to bring Virtual Reality right to our smartphones, and it has done so by continuously working on its cardboard VR headset. Recently, the search engine giant has recently announced that its Cardboard VR app for both Android and iOS in 100 countries, as well as improvements of its software development kit.
According to the Google Developer’s Blog, the new SDK addresses the top two requests from its user base. The first is drift correction that substantially decreases the drift, especially for smartphones with low-quality sensors. The second is added support for a full Unity-native distortion pass that improves performance by avoiding every major plug-in overhead. It also enables apps on the platform to work with Metal rendering on iPhone’s iOS and multi-threaded rendering on Android. These updates all bring a much better and improved Virtual Experience to Google Cardboard users.
Additionally, Google has also added the Google Street View in Cardboard so users can explore different places on Google Maps. Users must first download the update for Google Street View for their respective platforms, then grab their Cardboard VR kits and immerse in the beautiful destinations without having to move from their locations.
Those who are interested in making their own Cardboard VR kit can download open designs by clicking here. However, if time is somewhat of an issue and money isn’t, users can select from Google’s growing options of certified viewers such as the Mattel View-Master and Zeiss One GX that’s on sale on Google’s website now.
The Google Cardboard app is now available in 39 languages and over 100 countries on both of the most popular mobile platforms today. Furthermore, the Cardboard developer docs are now published in 10 languages, so that developers around the world can play around and build a great Virtual Reality experience to the masses.
