Google dominates mass market VR with 5 million Cardboard viewers, 1000 VR apps

While the world is waiting around for Oculus, Google's already shipped 5 million of its low-cost Cardboard viewers and boasts up to 1,000 VR apps available on its app store. The range of VR experiences available to Cardboard users is staggering with everything from games, to immersive virtual museum tours and even different ways to watch videos and look at panoramic images on smartphones they already own.

On the other end of the spectrum, Google is also enabling creators to make VR experiences with the Cardboard camera app as well as Jump VR authoring suite. 

Next up for Google Cardboard, how about a way to make it less resource intensive on smartphones, which tend to use up a lot of battery life and warm up.

Source: Google

Samsung set to open a VR movie studio in New York

Samsung wants more content for its Gear VR headset. And hoping to help push that goal further is a new movie studio the company plans to open up in New York. The virtual reality studio will be located inside an existing Samsung office in the city. The South Korean brand revealed its plans at the Sundance Film Festival. They didn’t go into much detail yet but we’re sure to hear more about it when more concrete plans are made.

The festival also became grounds where Samsung showed off not just its VR material but also a place where they announced a one-year partnership with the Sundance Institute. The collaboration hopes to foster movie makers and other creative to explore the medium. And who knows maybe the 2017 would have VR play a much bigger role in the film festival.

Source: CNET | Via: Engadget

Virtual & augmented reality researcher Doug Bowman reportedly joins Apple

One of the top virtual reality researchers in the U.S. has reportedly joined Apple, perhaps to speed up the company’s development in that arena. Doug Bowman was recently a computer science professor at Virginia Tech and he was also director of Virginia Tech’s human-computer interaction center for about five years. His focus was said to be on “three-dimensional user interface design and the benefits of immersion in virtual environments.” He’s had experience in fully immersive virtual reality (like those of HTC’s Vive and Google Cardboard) and augmented reality like Google Glass. The video above shows what Bowman has been doing at Virginia Tech.

Some say Apple is lagging behind in virtual and augmented reality software development so hires like Bowman and recent acquisitions in the virtual reality market might be what Apple needs to catch up.

Source: 9to5Mac

Google wants to bring spatial audio to Cardboard

Google’s Cardboard division, the group in charge of the development of the company’s Virtual Reality Platform recently announced that they’re updating the SDK of the platform to allow for spatial audio to be added into developers’ apps. Spatial audio—or 3D or binaural audio—is designed to allow sound to shift between channels when you move the position of your head to create an immersive audio experience. The new SDK for Cardboard doesn’t just allow developers to determine the relative position of sound, they can also emulate the material and size, even with having to work on a smartphone CPU. So, the next time you use an app with Cardboard, you might even be able to hear things like planes flying by.

Source: Google Developers Blog