Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google’s big jump into virtual reality”.
Vr is finally happening for real facebook’s oculus is coming out 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 at 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 strength 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, vr experience so google’s making a new version.
It’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 with an iphone 6 plus or a nexus 6. They also got rid of the magnet, and instead it has this crazy.
Little button inside with conductive foam, it 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 and 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 this is crazy. So the wave rock it’s in perth, australia. Okay and it’s this rock uh shaped like a tall breaking ocean wave um 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 working, what you’re doing so what’s interesting is these: are these two guys are sort of so actually somebody started i’m going to stop class for a second all right because it sounded like you were going to ask me. Let’S ask a question: yeah we’re going to come back to class for a 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, but all like you’ve got a classroom of like 38 year olds, going uh in totally different directions. It must be hilarious.
The footage is wonderful. Okay, the reaction you get from students in these classes is, if they’re there looking up at something going: wow, that’s big or looking right. Oh, my god, we’re scuba diving right 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 uh, 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 uh. In fact, that’s one of the one of the features of expeditions we found the students would never know that you’re just reading off. I sound as a teacher right like i’ve actually been here right, but 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, you 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 with vr is they’re, releasing the specs so that 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, so you’re not just 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, i 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 a 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, like i know, there’s no exact answer, but you guys are throwing a ton of it yeah. So for 30 seconds of vr footage. Well, the nice thing is, we can always point more computers at it. Google 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 it live.
If we wanted 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 in virtual reality than they’ve led 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, that’s good um. 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 end 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 uh.
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 can even take kids on a virtual field trip. But it’s obvious that google has way bigger ambitions. They’Re not going to let facebook and htc and sony have vr all to themselves, but for now they’re sticking with this, because i think they believe that the best vr is the one you have with you.
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