Virtual Reality: Google Cardboard Inside Story

I guess I'm not the only one who found Google's original cardboard VR Virtual Reality headgear a littel bizzare. In this article Wired takes a look at how Google is going from a no-tech no-frills initial foray into VR into what is becoming a strategic direction for them.

Wired by Cade Metz

Plagemann was intrigued—“David showed me this cardboard box,” he says, “and I thought it was absolutely amazing”—and he took the contraption to Google’s bigwigs, including CEO Larry Page and vice president of engineering Sundar Pichai. “I convinced him to leave me one of the boxes. He flew back to Paris. And I started showing it around,” Plagemann remembers.

Two months later, Pichai unveiled the project on the keynote stage at Google’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, and Google employees handed cardboard headsets to thousands of coders as they streamed from the speakers’ hall. It was a slightly odd sideshow at a conference where the company typically doled out millions of dollars in phones, tablets, and other electronic gear. But in the year since, this unexpectedly low-tech device—something that wraps around an ordinary smartphone screen—has engendered a sweeping virtual reality project inside the company, giving Google a foothold in an area poised to reshape the tech world. read more...