Gadgetory

vr is finally happening for real Facebook's oculus is coming up next year and it's going to be big but is Google even in this game they have this thing called cardboard that's well made out of cardboard and you stick an Android phone in it and you can look around to stuff you can play in VR there's people that are doing a lot of really cool stuff with it but it's mostly just a bunch of little tech demos so the question I have is is this for real or is it just an experiment first of all not at all an experiment in a sense first of all that we have a large team working on cardboard and the things around cardboard so certainly inside Google it's not viewed as an experiment the thing that's important and powerful about cardboard yes it's made out of cardboard but that's also its strengths that for a couple bucks anyone with the computer in their pocket there that they already have can have a taste of VR this kind of bite-sized via our experience so Google's making a new version that's announcing this year and the big deal with this is that it works with larger phones it can work with phones up to six inches or work with an iPhone 6 plus or Nexus 6 and they also got rid of the magnet and instead it has this crazy little button inside with conductive foam that actually uses an interior hinge mechanism to in essence tap the screen it kind of moves your finger via some conductive foam inside the cardboard and it's as if you're pushing on the screen one of the things Google is doing with cardboard is this project called expeditions it's this giant cardboard box it's full of these visors and some nexus phones and a tablet and it lets teachers lead virtual field trips for their classroom so instead of wheeling in the old VCR and CRT TV it's a little bit like Magic School Bus kids can go on virtual expeditions it basically can turn any teacher into Miss Frizzle all right I am looking at some woods and there's some people standing off yeah then there's and if you look to your left and I can actually see where you're looking here that is the wave rock and huh so the wave rock it's in Perth Australia okay honest this rock shaped like a tall breaking ocean wave and if you look up well I see there's an arrow in my view that's right so I was actually pointing out one interesting feature of the wave rock as I move around the arrow like gets less like hey stop well here what you're doing so what's interesting is these are these two guys are sort of so actually since I started a gonna stop class for a second because it sounded like you're gonna ask you a question yeah we're gonna connect the last row second since these started at two different spots they both are looking in the same space but like relatively speaking they were like different positions so like this one saw the hills over here and this one saw it over here so as a teacher you're looking at 30 kids all looking at the same thing they all like you've got a classroom of like 38 year-olds going in totally different directions it must be hilarious the footage is wonderful okay the reaction you get from your students in these classes is if they're they're looking up at something like wow that's big or looking right oh my god we're scuba diving right on it from from our classroom there's something pretty special about it and so these are actually sandstone formations that have been eroded over many many thousands of years sorry limestone so tell me the truth - do do you know all this or do you have a cheat sheet on your tablet that is giving you all this information I have a cheat sheet okay and in fact that's one of the one of the features of expeditions we found students would never know I sound as a teacher right like I've actually been here it's really important because I think you know just just as a tour guide in the place would know all about that place when you're the tour guide as the teacher we want to make sure that you're able to take the class through the things that matter right and of course you could write your own tour as a teacher another thing they're doing is VR is they're releasing a spec Celyn anybody can build their own 360 degree camera with 16 GoPros it's pretty wild so the camera has 16 lenses oriented around the circumference of a circle all looking out and we use those 16 images the images from those 16 cameras we upload those to Google Data Center and then we have a set of algorithms which use pretty deep computational photography techniques to from those 16 images create on the order of a thousand images so it's as if you had a thousand cameras instead of 16 around the circle you know stitching them together you're actually making like a continuous exactly right so you're not just trying to jam two images together but instead if you think about okay I need to I need to see what the left eye and the right eye would see here you're taking these two images on the circumference and then when you're looking here you're taking these two images and then these two images and when you have a thousand images to take from you can get perfectly smooth and and perceptually accurate in a sense that you have correct uniform stereo and no stitching artifacts throughout the entire sphere you're in essence creating something from nothing you're create it's as if you had built a camera made up of a thousand cameras but of course that would violate the laws of physics but we've done that in software and the results are really stunning where you can just step into a video into a place and experience it like you're actually there so like how much like for like 30 seconds of VR footage like how long does it take to process that I know there's no exact answer but guys are starting a ton of yeah so for 30 seconds of VR footage well the nice thing is we can always point more computers at it who will has a few computers so we can point more computers at it and do it in real time if we want it we could do a live if we want it it's just a matter of spinning up more and more computers so did you catch that bit about Google needing to use its servers to process all the video from that camera those servers are actually a sign they're a tell that Google has way bigger ambitions and virtual reality than they let on so far with their little cardboard projects so it's a really cool rig but it requires all this processing power and while I'm willing to go out and buy a bunch of 16 GoPros it's good why not create a new kind of super camera that could just do it without having to do all this insane stitching power on the back is that is that a thing that is even possible that's a great idea it was just software and atoms and so on right and one of the many things we're thinking about so that's cardboard the new version works on any size phone and it'll even work with an iPhone if you can find the apps for it it's fun and you can play lots of little games and you could even take kids on a virtual field trip but it's obvious that Google has way bigger ambitions they're not gonna let Facebook and HTC and Sony have VR all's of themselves but for now they're sticking with this because I think they believe that the best VR is that when you have with you