#THE EYES OF ARA VIRTUAL REALITY ANDROID#

#THE EYES OF ARA VIRTUAL REALITY ANDROID#

Essentially, it's a cardboard housing for a smartphone running Google's Android mobile OS. That's where Google Cardboard, perhaps one of the most important, quirky, and ingenious advances in consumer VR since the Rift itself, comes in.Īnnounced as part of Google's annual product giveaway at I/O, Cardboard is a meant to be a super-low-cost, crowdsourced toolkit anyone can build to run elementary VR experiences. So while technologists believe in VR, our friends, family, and the folks freaked out by Google Glass, the company's smart eyewear, aren't going to have the opportunity to try out a modern-day VR experience until full-blown headsets arrive in the next year or so. Why? Well, most everyday technology users don't frequent electronics trade shows or game developer conferences, where the Rift and Morpheus are trotted out and where attendees line up to give them a whirl. Unless you've strapped an Oculus Rift or Sony's Project Morpheus to your face - devices that quite literally change the world before your eyes - you're not likely to think a high-fidelity VR headset is really a product category capable of changing industries. It arises from the fact that the technology, as it stands now, is firmly in the 'you have to see it to believe it' camp of consumer electronics.

The crucial disparity between the critical reception of Oculus' product and the public's perception of VR is a problem. That's a realm where people sit in the living room with computers strapped to their faces, ignoring each other and escaping even further from reality and face-to-face contact. It's a futurist's fantasy easily caricatured, an activity we could see devolving into the kind of techno-dystopian world that we fear Facebook and the smartphone era has already begun creating. Oculus, now flush with resources and the game industry's finest minds, is the VR torchbearer, blazing a trail toward a bright future we'd thought only science fiction could provide.īut for most people, consumer VR is still a fringe technology. Oculus is the once-scrappy outfit started by 21-year-old Palmer Luckey that was purchased by Mark Zuckerberg's social network in March. VR is supposed to change everything: film, gaming, communication, travel, education - even what we understand about sensory experience itself. While it's no Oculus Rift headset, Google's Cardboard initiative has a huge role to play in VR by putting it in the hands of anyone with $25 and a smartphone. Turns out, Google is using cheap, corrugated paper to give virtual reality its neatest and most accessible tool for converting nonbelievers. Google: Next Android doubles app performance.

Google struts out Project Tango tablet for developers.

Chief of Google's Project Ara talks modular smartphones.

Google targeting Project Ara modular phone for January 2015.

The eyes of ara virtual reality