Items tagged with cardboard
Once again, The New York Times is planning to distribute Google Cardboard viewers to its "most loyal digital subscribers." It's the second time NYT has collaborated with Google to hand out Cardboard viewers to subscribers—the first time was in 2015 when it gave away more than a million viewers to celebrate the launch of its VR app.For its second act, NYT is handing out 300,000 more Cardboard viewers. The giveaway is aimed in part at promoting "Seeking Pluto's Frigid Heart," a stereoscopic VR experience that allows viewers to soar over Pluto, including "never-before-seen rugged mountains and brights plans," along with standing on Pluto's surface while its largest moon hovers in the horizon.NYT...
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Mattel brought its A-game to the Toy Industry Association's Toy Fair in New York this week by reimagining a pair of products for the modern generation. One of those products is the ThingMaker, a $300 3D printer that allows kids to easily and safely make their own toys, and the other is a retooled View-Master based on Google's Cardboard VR viewer. It's a logical fit—for decades the View-Master has been treating eyeballs to rudimentary 3D experiences by inserting paper cards with photos in them. A pull of the plastic lever would cycle through the various photos, which in a sense you could liken to an early version of virtual reality. Now that technology has advanced leaps and bounds since the original...
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When it comes to virtual reality technologies, the consensus is that seeing is believing. However, VR isn't just about treating your eyeballs to a plethora of realistic visuals, it's about bombarding the senses as a whole for a truly immersive experience. With that goal in mind, Google today announced the addition of spatial audio support to its Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android. What spatial audio does is allow users to hear where sounds are coming from. It goes beyond simple left and right side audio and attempts to let developers produce sounds the say humans actually hear it, including above, below, in front of, and behind them. In this case, all that's required is a set of headphones...
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Sometimes, it's enlightening to see what people are willing to do in order to bring the rest of us joy. Take stop motion animation, for example. It can take tens or hundreds of tedious hours to produce something that's worth watching. When watching a video like that, though, it's easy to have an idea of what to expect. Other times, you might have no idea what's coming, such as with a video posted at the end of October by YouTube user Mickey W. To give people a chance at winning one of its 34UC87C ultra-wide monitors, LG hosted a contest to get people to build computers out of cardboard. You no doubt already have some images springing to mind. Mickey W took things to the next level, though. His...
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What at first seemed like a “You’ve got to be kidding me” contraption from Google is actually turning out to be quite a surprise breakout for the search giant. Google announced this week that over 500,000 Cardboard virtual reality headset kits have ended up in the hands of consumers since it was first released earlier this year. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why Google Cardboard has been a success; the low-cost materials used in its construction allow the device to be sold for $20. And if you’re inventive enough, you can build your own from scratch using plans from Google. On the other end of the spectrum, a fully functional virtual reality headset from Samsung will cost you $199....
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