
Google Open-Sources Cardboard - sahin-boydas
https://github.com/googlevr/cardboard
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ipsum2
For those out of the loop: Google has gradually shut down and in some cases,
open sourced their VR projects (Daydream, Mirage, VR180, Seurat, etc) over the
last 6-12 months to be more focused on their mobile AR projects (ARCore,
Google Streetview AR, Lens, etc). A sad day for VR.

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unlinked_dll
I mean not a sad day for VR. Google is just being Google and thinking that XR
is a tech problem. It’s not.

The XR gap is in content, not developers, and not tech. Any VR play should be
throwing money at creatives, not devs or APIs or frameworks.

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kayoone
I bought an Oculus Rift devkit and later the full version and loved it, but I
actually have doubts about it only being a content problem. VR has some
inherent problems (lack of any outside visibility, motion sickness, space
restrictions) that are hard to solve and keep many people away from it. For me
it only really worked in racing games where i was not moving at all and even
then it is quite exhausting.

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rosybox
Those are pretty large problems. As an outsider it seems that the people
bullish on VR think consumers, with respect to these problems you mentioned,
will just get over it because of how compelling VR is. It seems obvious to me
that they will not get over it.

The lack of any outside visibility is a huge problem for families. It is anti-
social. Small kids can't be near you while you are using VR. Pets can't really
be near you.

It's very difficult to share your experience with other people. VR streamers
aren't very popular on Twitch. They probably have issues interacting with
their audience since they can't easily see Twitch chat I would think.

I also question the accessibility of VR. At what severity of physical
impairment does VR become unusable?

There are just so many problems with VR as a mass-consumer product that don't
have anything to do with technology.

AR doesn't have many of these problems, because you can still see other
people.

Google's direction makes sense.

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unlinked_dll
>It is anti-social

that's why location based experiences (LBE) is the solution. Different
monetization route, it's basically a theme park model (invest in cutting edge
tech/high value content) and maximize throughput like a VR "ride."

Having gone through a number of the experiences I'd highly recommend them.
Better than anything you can get at home, it's a fun outing with your friends,
and the content is pretty awesome.

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djmips
Like I mentioned in another comment, there's no quality control and testing in
the wild west of VR games on Steam so many of them are terrible and cause
motion sickness. My hope with LBE is that the experiences will have been
thoroughly researched and tested to mitigate the sickness problem at least.
The other advantage to the theme park model is that the experiences last under
10 minutes.

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moron4hire
Unfortunately, if the Star Trek experience I saw at Dave & Busters is any
indication, the QC is not there. But this has more to do with the economic
structure of these companies purchasing these experiences. They sub them out
to the lowest bidder, with the budget being too small to do what they want,
but no willingness to compromise on the vision. It may not even be the
customer's fault, I've seen first hand consultoware managers pushing projects
into directions that were not in the client's best interest, but did fit their
MBA trained ideas on how to squeeze money out of clients.

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amanzi
For what it is, Cardboard is pretty cool technology that opens up the VR world
to a lot of people that would never be able to afford the high end equipment
needed for real VR. I had a couple of cheap Cardboard viewers and then
upgraded to the Samsung VR goggles which are also surprisingly good for the
money.The Samsung/Oculus partnership seems to still be strong, for now at
least.

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CrackerNews
>The Samsung/Oculus partnership seems to still be strong, for now at least.

Gear VR doesn't support Note 10 and there's rumors that their partnership has
ended.

The VR industry is moving past mobile VR because it has trouble with user
retention. Oculus can abandon Gear VR and Samsung to focus on their own VR
solutions from Go to Quest to Rift.

Samsung then is still working on their standalone headset and possibly a next
generation Windows Mixed Reality headset

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cynic_
Carmack's Eulogy For The Gear VR
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4)

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dragonsh
If open source cardboard included Daydream hardware specifications and
fabrication files will be nice.

Google has already abandoned the project so it should not be an issue to
release hardware and related assets under open source along with SDK.

It might allow different companies to continue daydream, instead of let it
die.

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fsiefken
Yes, then we would have an open-sourced mobile VR solution.. which is now
being dominated by Oculus Quest and Facebook. I totally love the Go and Quest
VR but open source competition is always good. Mozilla Hubs, JanusVR,
Firestorm Viewer and Firefox Reality are all nice open VR projects but they
sit on top a VR capable system which is not open source, at least not the 6DoF
part. With WebVR 3DOF works, you can watch immersive videos and have limited
social VR

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modeless
Blog post here: [https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-
goog...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-google-
cardboard.html)

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sdan
Is Cardboard still being used? After the death of Daydream, I'm assuming
Google is pretty much entirely out of VR at this point... although I may be
completely wrong.

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dyarosla
They do have several software projects: blocks, poly, tilt brush. I also
believe they have various VR divisions. Don’t count them out yet- my take is
that the Oculus Quest put the nail in the coffin for ‘phone based’ VR (cheap
and solid with controllers/and soon hand tracking is just a better product)
and most investment going forward will probably be diverted in that direction
(whether it be competing hardware products or complementary software)

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dmix
Has the Quest been a successful product?

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soulofmischief
Keep in mind the scope of the entire VR market. It has yet to reach critical
mass. Anecdotally, I tried a Quest over the weekend and was blown away. The
lower FPS was a bit disorienting in some conditions due to strobing, but the
resolution and general responsiveness was just incredible.

And once Oculus Link is released, the Rift catalogue will be available for the
Quest, and I'm considering upgrading from a Rift now that it seems like a real
upgrade. I'd say a product which convinces current adopters to upgrade so soon
is a success.

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snowwrestler
Anyone know what happened to NY Times VR? They shipped Google Carboard to a
ton of subscribers, launched an app, had a whole section of their site... it
seems to be all gone. They had a great immersive (pun) story about dolphins
that I loved to revisit.

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reaperducer
It still exists on the NY Times app. Tap the "Sections" tab, then scroll most
of the way down and the content under "Immersive (AR/VR)." There's dozens of
items in there.

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rocky1138
I wonder if this type of content makes it to a library like the rest of
newspaper content does, for archival and reference purposes.

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CrackerNews
Google must have faced the same problems that Oculus faced when it came to
user retention. Carmack reported that people tried Gear VR once or twice
before never touching it again.

Meanwhile, Quest managed to have user retention solely from how seamless it is
to strap on a device and get going in VR. This is opposed to the inconvenience
from taking out the phone from the case and putting it inside a device.

A seamless, cordless experience like the Quest is probably the future of VR
even if it has limitations now and is still too relatively expensive for the
masses. The Cardboard/Daydream/Gear VR line of VR is seen as a dead end now.
Daydream is dead, and Gear VR might as well be dead.

Google must have looked at what it has on the horizon for VR and decided that
it now can't compete with the likes of Oculus and HTC.

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lostgame
Oh, neat! I’d already been utilizing this and it being FOSS means only even
more control.

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russellbeattie
I spent $69 on a Daydream headset a month or so ago just to play with it, only
to find out it didn't work with my phone. I kept it just in case. Then Google
cancelled it. It'd be nice if they opened up that code as well...

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whywhywhywhy
You should give an Oculus Quest a try if you ever get the opportunity.

VR isn't really about the 3D effect it's about having your head and hands
tracked in a 3D space and what can come from that level of interaction.
Daydream never really offered this and after using a decent amount of VR I
find that the most important part of the experience.

~~~
russellbeattie
Actually, buying the Quest is what made me decide to grab a Dream headset.
After playing with WebVR/WebXR demos, I thought wow, I should grab a Dream
headset and see what my phone can do. This was at the end of September.

Then I realized it wasn't compatible, but figured I might get a new Pixel when
they launched, so I kept it just in case... Whoops.

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skocznymroczny
I played with Cardboard, and I didn't get any VR feeling from it. It was more
like "a screen right in your face" experience, but I didn't get any 3D feeling
out of it.

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aasasd
I still don't quite understand why I can't strap myself to my existing phone
with a couple of periscopes, run an app outputting the two images on the left
and the right halves, and control it with some bluetooth joypad.

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askvictor
Isn't this exactly what cardboard/daydream does (daydream has a controller;
cardboard doesn't, but I think a lot of VR apps will honor a bluetooth
controller anyway)

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aasasd
Afaik they only support specific phone models—understandable due to the fixed
dimensions of the headset. Not so understandable is why I don't see apps that
support any phone as long as I can build a headset for it.

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moron4hire
Largely, it comes down to Android being a bad OS for input latency (indeed,
Oculus and Samsung had to perform what John Carmack described as "deep hacks"
into the Android kernel to get it to a reasonable state with Gear VR), most
phones not having a high-enough quality IMU for tracking head motion, and most
phones not having a low persistence display (high persistence causes a
smearing effect in the visual).

So while "Cardboard" can "work" on most phones, it's a pretty terrible
experience, once you get past the awe factor of seeing stereoscopic visuals
with head tracking. Us developers have largely stopped making anything with
basic "Cardboard" support, for fear of giving people a bad first impression of
VR.

As for Daydream, a lot of the point of the Daydream system was to get around
those issues I mentioned. First, it required phones to meet a certain hardware
profile to before they were allowed to market themselves as "Daydream
Compatible". Second, it included changes to the operating system to provide
much lower latency in input tracking and change display settings to reduce
pixel persistence.

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aasasd
Interesting, thanks!

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makz
The same way they open-sourced Android?

