Google Cardboard is a cheap, effective way for Google to collect data about virtual reality (VR) from customers who are interested in VR. Five million Cardboard viewers have shipped, and 25 million VR apps have been downloaded.
Facebook released its much-hyped Oculus Rift VR headset, and HTC Vive has basically come out on top in terms of overall VR experiences because of its motion-tracking capabilities, controllers and front-facing camera, which allows you to see where you’re going.
The New York Times (NYT) and Google gave away and shipped a million Google Cardboard VR headsets which were bundled with an NYT VR app to subscribers who receive a physical copy of the daily newspaper to their place of residence. This allowed Google to leverage the NYT subscriber data and package many people’s first experience with VR. What’s interesting from Google’s point of view is how much traction Google Cardboard will get from people still used to a physical product versus a novel VR experience.
As a follow-up, NYT and Google are sending out 300,000 Cardboard headsets to digital customers who’ve held online subscriptions for the longest duration. This new round of shipments coincides with the May 19 release of the eighth VR production from NYT, Seeking Pluto's Frigid Heart—a visualization of the dwarf planet based on computer-generated images. The reliance on CGI is a first for NYT, whose previous releases were in a live-action video format. Google Cardboard seems to me to be more like a massive scouting probe for collecting the best information about building a VR customer base to sell them future VR products, including a possible headset to rival Facebook and HTC (and maybe Apple).
Perhaps because of the aloof way in which Google presented Google Glass, the company is being more cautious about producing a VR headset to compete with Oculus Rift and the Vive headsets. A new version of Google Glass has been patented and is being developed by former Apple executive Tony Fadell.
The main difference in Google’s VR strategy is that it is Web based and doesn’t require the intrinsic hardware upgrade that many new Oculus and Vive users have to make for their home VR station. Google (subsidiary of Alphabet) also owns YouTube, which is a perfect platform for photorealistic VR in the form of 360-degree videos. To help democratize the creation of 360-degree video content, Google created the 360 camera software and uses the GoPro Odyssey camera rig, which has 16 HERO4 cameras set up in a circular array.
For those interested in Google VR but who don’t have $15,000 to drop on GoPro’s turnkey Odyssey product, Google is releasing schematics to build you own rig, including the release of STL files for 3D printing some components. Not that these haven’t been around already for years on STL file-sharing sites like Thingiverse. Perhaps a greater contribution to Google’s attempt to democratize VR and help users generate 360-degree video content for YouTube is the assembler software that stitches all of the captured video together.
Appropriately called Jump Assembler, the software stitches together the 16 different video feeds (assuming you are using the GoPro Odyssey camera rig to capture video) into stereoscopic 360-degree video, ready to be consumed on Google Cardboard on YouTube, which is a computationally intensive task. There are all sorts of corrections that need to be made to stitch even one frame of video together, such as alignment, color compensation and exposure compensation, for example.
I think it’s safe to say that Google is making plans beyond Google Cardboard, which I think is a relatively safe way to figure out how to create a loyal database of users who are interested in Google’s VR efforts —a safe way to test the waters, while watching how the public reacts to the first wave of consumer headsets. At $15,000, GoPro’s Odyssey is a bit expensive. It captures video in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and then the Jump Assembler engine outputs h.264 MP4 files as stereoscopic 2K and 8K video, ready for uploading on YouTube.
But smartphone and Web-based VR experiences of 360-degree video in formats like Google Cardboard are extremely limited in terms of capability when compared to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. For one, there are no controllers or buttons you can use without opening the cardboard and touching the screen of your smartphone. Smartphones were not designed to be VR devices, though maybe there will be some accessories coming out soon. At Google I/O, a conference happening this week from May 18 to 20 in Mountain View at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, VR will definitely be on the table, especially on the 19th at 9am.
At Google I/O, besides learning about whether or not they’re releasing a new VR headset (I’m guessing something to compete with Samsung Gear VR), I’m expecting to hear more about a few recent changes that signal an increased interest in Web-based VR content. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, appointed Clay Bevor, former vice president of Google Software Product, as the new vice president of VR at the company. Bevor was a natural appointment, as he had been spending more time working on VR projects after overseeing Google Cardboard since it launched in 2014.
Another recent addition to Google’s VR interests is Josh Carpenter, who held a leadership position on the research team at Mozilla VR. Carpenter spent his time at Mozilla working on A-Frame and WebVR, which were created and designed in order to democratize VR to Web developers around the world. This brings up an interesting point: High-end game developers have a skillset that makes working on VR platforms easier than a Web developer.
So if Google is working on a headset to compete with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, I’m guessing it will be optimized for immersive Internet-based VR experiences. If Web developers can create high-quality experiences like game developers currently can, then a new headset from Google could be a bit more sophisticated than Google Cardboard, and probably a bit lighter than the Oculus Rift and slightly heavier than the HTC Vive.
With this type of web-based headset, average internet connectivity speeds would benefit from increasing. Given the continuing impact of Google Fiber on telecommunications giants like Comcast and AT&T, the average speed of the general population’s Internet connection should be on the rise. By offering super-fast, 1-Gbps broadband for $70 a month, Google Fiber is a powerful new contender for telecommunications companies to deal with. The increased connectivity would also certainly empower immersive Web-based VR content, which fits in with Google’s current strategy to leverage their dominance on the Internet. This has caused Comcast to offer 80 TV channels and lower-speed connections for $80 a month, and in certain cities, they even have a $70-per-month, 1-Gbps service option for customers who sign a three-year contract. AT&T has responded by lowering the price of its 1-Gbps service to $70 a month in Austin, which has access to Google Fiber.
The current consumer hype (generated by people’s experiences with headsets like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift about VR) is something to keep firmly planted in your mind. The reality that is two separate VR camps are possibly competing for the future. But really, there’s no reason Web-based VR and standalone VR workstations with nifty (and eventually heavy) headsets can’t co-exist.