Gadgetory

hi I'm addy with the version I'm here with the very beginning of Google daydream what does daydream you might ask it's Google's VR platform that's supposed to be much more advanced than Google cardboard which had introduced a couple of years ago it's mobile virtual reality that actually comes with a motion controller so daydream isn't actually coming out until this fall when we start saying all the hardware that's going to come with it daydream compatible phones the actual headset the actual controller but the latest Android n Developer Preview does have some virtual reality features that are meant for people to just get a taste of what daydream can do so they can develop their own apps so let's take a look at this so what we've got here is a painting app that Google is suggesting you use to see sort of how daydream will function and what you can do is launch this on the Nexus 6p phone which again is the only phone that Google actually considers a development kit it's saying it's not a daydream phone you're not going to be able to use it for the final daydream and it's going to be a little bit substandard in terms of performance it's going to start throttling when it gets too hot but for now it's good enough so obviously this doesn't look very much like an actual controller and Google doesn't quite have a solution for this but I have something kind of clever it has an overlay that you can print out and put over your phone so it looks less like a phone I guess and more like a controller and you can just focus on these buttons so we're gonna tape this on right now and we're gonna start painting you start painting with the controller you double tap the trackpad to start drawing a line and it actually will use the accelerometer and gyroscope to detect motion and do a pretty good job of emulating motion control so this is really different from what you'd see on the the HTC vive or the oculus rift because there's no camera tracking this stuff it's not actually telling you where this is in space what it can do is tell okay how far is this moving what direction is it moving and it can actually do a really good job of predicting where it is based on that so there's actually a much more popular google app called tilt brush which is for the HTC vive it's a really sophisticated painting tool this is a little bit like tilt brush but it actually highlights one of the big differences between daydream and something like the vibe which is that when you're painting in tilt brush you can actually walk around the room and see your painting in three dimensions now daydream isn't going to have this positional tracking what it has is it can tell which way your head is turning so you can't actually see these things that you're drawing in three dimensions it's sort of like you're painting flat on a cylinder it looks really cool but it's not quite the same thing and this is sort of why it might be hard to bring something like tilt brush over to daydream so obviously I'm not trying daydream this isn't really what daydream is going to be like but it does give me some hope that these trackers could be pretty good if the final controller is as precise as this then it's actually very accurate it's a little bit slow and a little bit laggy if I move very quickly in weird directions right now but I think that you can easily use it for painting or for selecting things or for playing simple games it actually makes me really excited about later this year you