Gadgetory

day during Google's new gear has set isn't very much like any of its competitors the PlayStation VR oculus rift HTC vive cure VR or even Google's own cardboard it's soft squishy and feels more like clothing than electronics but the data room team has spent a long time getting to that point we went to Google's offices in Mountain View to see how they did it the view is supposed to be one option among many for Google daydream headsets but it's Google's way of setting a tone for the entire platform and to do that the company looks not to electronics but to clothes the headset draws on a lot of different types of soft goods of clothing for example the head strap it adjusts much like you'd adjust a pair of ski goggles the outer part of the headset kind of the body of it it's sort of rigid right it's soft but it also holds its form so something like comfortable pair of shoes and then just the material which the whole thing is clad in I think is reminiscent of a super comfortable t-shirt right or something that you just wear out and about this was the starting point of daydream view because technically it's all you need in a headset just strap a phone to one side and put a pair of lenses on the other and you have something like a very simple Google cardboard the problem is this doesn't feel very good the daydream team needed to end up with something more like the Samsung gear VR with padding a strap and a controller and they needed to do it without weighing down user's faces or making it too tough to get to their phones the first step was 3d printed mock-ups these were a heavy and stiff but they let the team figure out of shapes that would fit the most people including ones with glasses then they experimented with finding the lightest materials possible ending up with a combination of plastic foam and fabric the view isn't a very complicated piece of hardware but it's the culmination of lots and lots of little decisions like what angle should the strap be to get it to sit right on somebody's head how do you make sure people can tell that they're supposed to open up the front and put a phone inside sometimes the most elegant solutions Google tried like magnets that seamlessly held the trace shut turned out to just confuse people they were much more likely to get that you should just pull a tab to open an elastic band on the one hand it's a VR headset which means you need to line up optical elements and the screen and everything else just so on the other hand it's something that you wear and so we had to kind of learn some new tricks in manufacturing we weren't just making things out of molded plastic but we also have sewing machines right and and other things that you find in a place where you're making shirts and clothes and so on take for example the fabric that's covering the daydream view it's got a distinct texture because solid colors made it look too much like hard plastic from a distance so Google set up a laser system that would let manufacturers precisely align the texture in the right way for each headset daydream view isn't just the headset it's also a custom controller that works kind of like a VR laser pointer if google has its way all kinds of companies are going to be making their own very unique looking daydream headsets but the controllers are all going to look pretty much like this but it could have looked very very different these are all possible shapes that Google thought about for its controller the daydream team even had people come by and model their dream VR controller in clay a lot of the designs look cool and way more futuristic up until you put them into your hand then you realize they're actually awkward and uncomfortable or they didn't fit into the headset tray one of the first things the daydream team decided they do you could almost say the final remotes a little boring compared to all these but it's the results of constant refining to figure out even little things like how high the buttons should be meanwhile the team was testing the software with something they called the garage door opener all the guts that made it into the daydream remote in a big black box we're usually excited when headsets get high-tech new features and Google hopes that daydream will have them in the future but they'll probably be on the phone not the headset one of the things that was very important to us with dataview is that it's simple it's easy to get in and out of and the more kind of active elements you add to the headset the more complex that come it becomes in terms of cost and manufacturability but also most importantly setup right you imagine plugging lots of little things in and connecting things and so on we want it to be simple we want it to be frictionless to get in and out of the are and the really simple largely passive headset design really helps with that now that daydream view is out in the world all googles decisions are getting put to the test are where is going to think it's as universally comfortable as it's supposed to be will making it out of fabric help people get over the fundamental weirdness of virtual reality the answers so far are we don't know and probably not but Google is taking VR someplace it's never been if only as we've just seen with a lot of stops along the way you