33 ms·

Google Open-Sources Cardboard

331 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

skocznymroczny 7y ago
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.
CrackerNews 7y ago
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.
makz 7y ago
The same way they open-sourced Android?
sdan 7y ago
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.
- dyarosla 7y ago
  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)
  - dmix 7y ago
    Has the Quest been a successful product?
    - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
      According to last reports it is selling as fast as they can make them. Quest is the first VR product that actually has the potential for mainstream success. Phone VR is tedious to use and PC VR provides a good experience but is expensive and only a small percentage of adults want a gaming tower PC in their homes in 2019.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      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.
    - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
      Overall market sales are still small but it's a very compelling product. It is absolutely dead simple to use (literally had age 5 to 75 pick it right up). It's very flexible with floor space and boundary size, so if you're in a small apartment it's still usable. Games work well and are optimized for it, solid tracking, etc. The kicker of course: it's an untethered system (which is great but sacrifices some visual quality). But even if that's an issue to you, shortly Oculus Connect will be available and you can use it as a viewer connected to your gaming PC.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Supposedly yes: https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-facebooks-non-advertising-revenue/ https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb... I bought mine in May and have been using it around 6-8 hours a week for working out (Box VR, Beat Saber). It is really a nice device for that, I’m not sure about gaming however.
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  The devices themselves are popular with educators. I volunteer in schools and have helped them turn old cell phones and iPod touches into fun learning tools. There is a lot of 360 degree video and content out there that is great for kids, and they're always excited to use it. And every teacher seems to have or know someone who has some old devices in a drawer somewhere that are perfectly suited for it.
dragonsh 7y ago
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.
- fsiefken 7y ago
  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
- joshspankit 7y ago
  I suspect that most of the reason this is not done more commonly (and I’m with you: I think it should be) is because higher-ups look at the associated patents and hoard them, thinking they may use them later.
snowwrestler 7y ago
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.
- milquetoastaf 7y ago
  They shut down their whole NYT Labs R&D operation in 2016 or so.
- TheCuckedKing 7y ago
  Fake news
- reaperducer 7y ago
  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.
  - rocky1138 7y ago
    I wonder if this type of content makes it to a library like the rest of newspaper content does, for archival and reference purposes.
ipsum2 7y ago
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.
- easytiger 7y ago
  Google is a hyperscale version of my often ephemeral attention span
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  Not really other than Cardboard most of Google’s VR output has been lacklustre. Same with their scrabble to copy Apple with AR.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Causality1 7y ago
  Yet another Google project resigned to the trash heap. Remember all the reviewers who acted as if not being Google Daydream compatible was a huge black mark against a new phone?
- EduardoBautista 7y ago
  It seems like Apple and Microsoft really nailed with focusing on AR instead of VR.
  - tootie 7y ago
    My company does some AR/VR development on behalf of customers along with more traditional web/mobile app development. We've done quite a few at this point and been successful from an internal point of view that we can concept, design and develop a high-quality product at a manageable cost. That being said, I see us struggling mightily to come up with an experience that's actually compelling in any way. We've got customers lining up asking us to help them get on this bandwagon and I see nothing but eye candy designed for a 30-second moment of joy and no real utility. I've seen some really cool experiences being built, but they're still mostly gimmicky and serving a tiny niche. There's rampant speculation that Apple will deliver a glasses experience where Google already failed. I think this is possibly the last chance for AR to get traction before going back to the shelf for another 20 years.
modeless 7y ago
Blog post here: https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-google-cardboard.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-goog...
chrisallick 7y ago
hahahaha this is the best headline ever.
lostgame 7y ago
Oh, neat! I’d already been utilizing this and it being FOSS means only even more control.
amanzi 7y ago
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.
- ElonMuskrat 7y ago
  Google Cardboard provides me the convenience of hands-free induced vomiting. I recommend Google Cardboard to all my other bulimic friends.
  - Doxin 7y ago
    Google Cardboard is pretty bad, but then that's rather the point of it. It's "minimum viable product" taken to an extreme: how cheap can you make VR and still have it be somewhat interesting. Google cardboard demonstrated that you can make VR incredibly cheaply and still have it be an eye-opening experience. Of course you don't use cardboard for hours on end, I'd be surprised if anyone used it for more than a couple minutes on-end. It's still a great introduction to VR though since it definitely demonstrates the potential of vr for nearly no cost. If not for google cardboard I'd never have invested in a vive, and probably written the whole thing off as a gimmick.
- CrackerNews 7y ago
  >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
  - cynic_ 7y ago
    Carmack's Eulogy For The Gear VR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4
aasasd 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- askvictor 7y ago
  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)
  - aasasd 7y ago
    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.
    - moron4hire 7y ago
      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.
russellbeattie 7y ago
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...
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- deckar01 7y ago
  Daydream didn't support 2:1 ratio displays for some reason. Most of Google's own flagship phones moved to that ratio. All they had to do was add black bars to the side to simulate 16:9, but they never did. I actually got Daydream to work by hacking the phone's hardware configuration to trick it into thinking the display was 1920x1080, but it caused the Android Moto launcher to freeze and crash too often. I purchased a Moto Z³, because I though it was daydream compatible only to find out Moto Z didn't mean the Moto Z line of phones, it meant a specific old model. Still waiting on a VR headset for it. The screen on my phone is leagues better than the one they put on the Oculus Go I am using.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    Nobody is making phone-slot-in headsets that are more than just "plastic Google Cardboard" anymore. Both Daydream and Gear VR are out, and there are no other projects in the works. You will not get that headset. Your best bet is to use a Daydream View (hopefully purchased on eBay so you're not paying $70) as a comfortable, well constructed Google Cardboard.

331 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

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.

CrackerNews 7y ago

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.

makz 7y ago

The same way they open-sourced Android?

sdan 7y ago

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.

dyarosla 7y ago
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)
- dmix 7y ago
  Has the Quest been a successful product?
  - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
    According to last reports it is selling as fast as they can make them. Quest is the first VR product that actually has the potential for mainstream success. Phone VR is tedious to use and PC VR provides a good experience but is expensive and only a small percentage of adults want a gaming tower PC in their homes in 2019.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    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.
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    Overall market sales are still small but it's a very compelling product. It is absolutely dead simple to use (literally had age 5 to 75 pick it right up). It's very flexible with floor space and boundary size, so if you're in a small apartment it's still usable. Games work well and are optimized for it, solid tracking, etc. The kicker of course: it's an untethered system (which is great but sacrifices some visual quality). But even if that's an issue to you, shortly Oculus Connect will be available and you can use it as a viewer connected to your gaming PC.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Supposedly yes: https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-facebooks-non-advertising-revenue/ https://qz.com/1739575/strong-oculus-quest-sales-boost-faceb... I bought mine in May and have been using it around 6-8 hours a week for working out (Box VR, Beat Saber). It is really a nice device for that, I’m not sure about gaming however.
makerofspoons 7y ago
The devices themselves are popular with educators. I volunteer in schools and have helped them turn old cell phones and iPod touches into fun learning tools. There is a lot of 360 degree video and content out there that is great for kids, and they're always excited to use it. And every teacher seems to have or know someone who has some old devices in a drawer somewhere that are perfectly suited for it.

dragonsh 7y ago

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.

fsiefken 7y ago
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
joshspankit 7y ago
I suspect that most of the reason this is not done more commonly (and I’m with you: I think it should be) is because higher-ups look at the associated patents and hoard them, thinking they may use them later.

snowwrestler 7y ago

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.

milquetoastaf 7y ago
They shut down their whole NYT Labs R&D operation in 2016 or so.
TheCuckedKing 7y ago
Fake news
reaperducer 7y ago
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.
- rocky1138 7y ago
  I wonder if this type of content makes it to a library like the rest of newspaper content does, for archival and reference purposes.

ipsum2 7y ago

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.

easytiger 7y ago
Google is a hyperscale version of my often ephemeral attention span
meheleventyone 7y ago
Not really other than Cardboard most of Google’s VR output has been lacklustre. Same with their scrabble to copy Apple with AR.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Causality1 7y ago
Yet another Google project resigned to the trash heap. Remember all the reviewers who acted as if not being Google Daydream compatible was a huge black mark against a new phone?
EduardoBautista 7y ago
It seems like Apple and Microsoft really nailed with focusing on AR instead of VR.
- tootie 7y ago
  My company does some AR/VR development on behalf of customers along with more traditional web/mobile app development. We've done quite a few at this point and been successful from an internal point of view that we can concept, design and develop a high-quality product at a manageable cost. That being said, I see us struggling mightily to come up with an experience that's actually compelling in any way. We've got customers lining up asking us to help them get on this bandwagon and I see nothing but eye candy designed for a 30-second moment of joy and no real utility. I've seen some really cool experiences being built, but they're still mostly gimmicky and serving a tiny niche. There's rampant speculation that Apple will deliver a glasses experience where Google already failed. I think this is possibly the last chance for AR to get traction before going back to the shelf for another 20 years.

modeless 7y ago

Blog post here: https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-google-cardboard.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/11/open-sourcing-goog...

chrisallick 7y ago

hahahaha this is the best headline ever.

lostgame 7y ago

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

amanzi 7y ago

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.

ElonMuskrat 7y ago
Google Cardboard provides me the convenience of hands-free induced vomiting. I recommend Google Cardboard to all my other bulimic friends.
- Doxin 7y ago
  Google Cardboard is pretty bad, but then that's rather the point of it. It's "minimum viable product" taken to an extreme: how cheap can you make VR and still have it be somewhat interesting. Google cardboard demonstrated that you can make VR incredibly cheaply and still have it be an eye-opening experience. Of course you don't use cardboard for hours on end, I'd be surprised if anyone used it for more than a couple minutes on-end. It's still a great introduction to VR though since it definitely demonstrates the potential of vr for nearly no cost. If not for google cardboard I'd never have invested in a vive, and probably written the whole thing off as a gimmick.
CrackerNews 7y ago
>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
- cynic_ 7y ago
  Carmack's Eulogy For The Gear VR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfd2lNRjqH4

aasasd 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
askvictor 7y ago
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)
- aasasd 7y ago
  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.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    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.

russellbeattie 7y ago

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...

whywhywhywhy 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
deckar01 7y ago
Daydream didn't support 2:1 ratio displays for some reason. Most of Google's own flagship phones moved to that ratio. All they had to do was add black bars to the side to simulate 16:9, but they never did. I actually got Daydream to work by hacking the phone's hardware configuration to trick it into thinking the display was 1920x1080, but it caused the Android Moto launcher to freeze and crash too often. I purchased a Moto Z³, because I though it was daydream compatible only to find out Moto Z didn't mean the Moto Z line of phones, it meant a specific old model. Still waiting on a VR headset for it. The screen on my phone is leagues better than the one they put on the Oculus Go I am using.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  Nobody is making phone-slot-in headsets that are more than just "plastic Google Cardboard" anymore. Both Daydream and Gear VR are out, and there are no other projects in the works. You will not get that headset. Your best bet is to use a Daydream View (hopefully purchased on eBay so you're not paying $70) as a comfortable, well constructed Google Cardboard.