Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager
Travel apps may include turtle photos, but they're nothing like diving into the open ocean. Real estate websites may include descriptions of the dining room, but it's nothing like actually touring the home. For developers, having immersive elements in their apps and websites can be the difference between meh and magical. That's why we're introducing VR view—a quick and easy way to embed immersive content on Android, iOS and the web.
VR views take 360 VR images or videos and transform them into interactive experiences that users can view on their phone, with a Cardboard viewer, or on their desktop computer. For native apps, you can embed a VR view by grabbing the latest Cardboard SDK for Android or iOS* and adding a few lines of code. On the web, embedding a VR view is as simple as adding an iframe on your site. We’re open-sourcing the HTML and JavaScript for web developers on github, so you can self-host and modify it to match your needs.
From travel and real estate to news and entertainment, we hope embeddable VR views make it quick and easy to share your story and build immersive and engaging visual experiences your users will love. We're excited to see what you create.
*Yes, you read that right! Starting today, there’ll be a native Cardboard SDK for iOS. Provided in idiomatic Objective C, and packaged as a single, easy-to-use CocoaPod, this new SDK includes all of the features already available in the Cardboard SDK for Android.
Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Google Cardboard
Human beings experience sound in all directions—like when a fire truck zooms by, or when an airplane is overhead. Starting today, the Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android support spatial audio, so you can create equally immersive audio experiences in your virtual reality (VR) apps. All your users need is their smartphone, a regular pair of headphones, and a Google Cardboard viewer.
Many apps create simple versions of spatial audio—by playing sounds from the left and right in separate speakers. But with today’s SDK updates, your app can produce sound the same way humans actually hear it. For example:
We built today’s updates with performance in mind, so adding spatial audio to your app has minimal impact on the primary CPU (where your app does most of its work). We achieve these results in a couple of ways:
It’s really easy to get started with the SDK’s new audio features. Unity developers will find a comprehensive set of components for creating soundscapes on Android, iOS, Windows and OS X. And native Android developers will now have a simple Java API for simulating virtual sounds and environments.
Check out our Android sample app (for developer reference only), browse the documentation on the Cardboard developers site, and start experimenting with spatial audio today. We’re excited to see (and hear) the new experiences you’ll create!
Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs*
At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:
Zooshi serves as a demonstration of how to build Android games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google:
As in our previous release, Pie Noon, we also made extensive use of Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.
You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can apply these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to toss some sushi around while you’re at it!
* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.
Posted by Jason Titus, Senior Director of Engineering
This morning, we kicked off our 8th annual Google I/O conference, joined by 5,600 developers at Moscone Center, 530 I/O Extended communities around the world, and millions via the I/O Live stream. This year’s event is focused on delivering incredible experiences on mobile and helping developers build successful businesses through these key themes: Develop, Engage, and Earn.
During the keynote, we had a number of announcements that covered the evolution of the mobile platform, tools for Android, iOS, and Web developers, and the push towards more immersive mobile experiences with VR. Here’s a closer look at the news:
Posted by Anthony Maurice, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google
Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back with an exciting new release for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android game) to add support for Google Cardboard, letting you jump into the action directly using your Android phone as a virtual reality headset! Select your targets by looking at them and throw pies with a flick of the switch.
We used the Cardboard SDK for Android, which helps simplify common virtual reality tasks like head tracking, rendering for Cardboard, and handling specialized input events. And you might remember us from before, bringing exciting game technologies like FlatBuffers, Pindrop, and Motive, all of which you can see in use in Pie Noon.
You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon on Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code, and take a look at how we brought an existing game into virtual reality.
Posted by Andrew Nartker, Product Manager, Google Cardboard
All of us is greater than any single one of us. That’s why we open sourced the Cardboard viewer design on day one. And why we’ve been working on virtual reality (VR) tools for manufacturers and developers ever since. We want to make VR better together, and the community continues to inspire us.
For example: what began with cardboard, velcro and some lenses has become a part of toy fairs and art shows and film festivals all over the world. There are also hundreds of Cardboard apps on Google Play, including test drives, roller coaster rides, and mountain climbs. And people keep finding new ways to bring VR into their daily lives—from campus tours to marriage proposals to vacation planning.
It’s what we dreamed about when we folded our first piece of cardboard, and combined it with a smartphone: a VR experience for everyone! And less than a year later, there’s a tremendous diversity of VR viewers and apps to choose from. To keep this creativity going, however, we also need to invest in compatibility. That’s why we’re announcing a new program called Works with Google Cardboard.
At its core, the program enables any Cardboard viewer to work well with any Cardboard app. And the result is more awesome VR for all of us.
These days you can find Cardboard viewers made from all sorts of materials—plastic, wood, metal, even pizza boxes. The challenge is that each viewer may have slightly different optics and dimensions, and apps actually need this info to deliver a great experience. That’s why, as part of today’s program, we’re releasing a new tool that configures any viewer for every Cardboard app, automatically.
As a manufacturer, all you need to do is define your viewer’s key parameters (like focal length, input type, and inter-lens distance), and you’ll get a QR code to place on your device. Once a user scans this code using the Google Cardboard app, all their other Cardboard VR experiences will be optimized for your viewer. And that’s it.
Starting today, manufacturers can also apply for a program certification badge. This way potential users will know, at a glance, that a VR viewer works great with Cardboard apps and games. Visit the Cardboard website to get started.
Whether you’re building your first VR app, or you’ve done it ten times before, creating an immersive experience comes with a unique set of design questions like, “How should I orient users at startup?” Or “How do menus even work in VR?”
We’ve explored these questions (and many more) since launch, and today we’re sharing our initial learnings with the developer community. Our new design guidelines focus on overall usability, as well as common VR pitfalls, so take a look and let us know your thoughts.
Of course, we want to make it easier to design and build great apps. So today we're also updating the Cardboard SDKs for Android and Unity—including improved head tracking and drift correction. In addition, both SDKs support the Works with Google Cardboard program, so all your apps will play nice with all certified VR viewers.
The number of Cardboard apps has quickly grown from dozens to hundreds, so we’re expanding our Google Play collection to help you find high-quality apps even faster. New categories include Music and Video, Games, and Experiences. Whether you’re blasting asteroids, or reliving the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, there’s plenty to explore on Google Play.
Today’s Works with Google Cardboard announcement means you’ll get the same great VR experience across a wide selection of Cardboard viewers. Find the viewer that fits you best, and then fire up your favorite apps.
Most of today’s VR experiences focus on what you see, but what you hear is just as important. That’s why we’re excited to welcome the Thrive Audio team from the School of Engineering in Trinity College Dublin to Google. With their ambisonic surround sound technology, we can start bringing immersive audio to VR.
In addition, we’re thrilled to have the Tilt Brush team join our family. With its innovative approach to 3D painting, Tilt Brush won last year’s Proto Award for Best Graphical User Interface. We’re looking forward to having them at Google, and building great apps together.
Ultimately, today’s updates are about making VR better together. Join the fold, and let’s have some fun.
