I had a try of Google’s Cardboard today and was impressed, and scared about how it felt.
Cool that it is made out of cardboard so they can ship it to you for about $25.00. Two eye pieces inside give you the realistic view. Simple velco on top to hold together most phones that are under 5 inches in total. Just for Android at the moment and must be running Jelly Bean 4.1 or above. A ring on the side the phone so when you pull and release the ring, your phone’s magnetometer detects changes in the magnetic field.
A very realistic feeling especially with Google Earth and a roller coaster app. The cardboard tends to absorb your oil from your forehead, so not something you want to pass around at a party. Good gift idea perhaps?
Check out more at Google Cardboard | Download the Cardboard App
Check out the hands-on from the crew at TechCrunch
So the scary is what will prolonged exposure to VR be? After a few seconds of standing and using Cardboard, it took me a minute to regain my whereabouts. I’m sure that better units like the Oculus Rift will have a very intense, but amazing experience when you incorporate sound, then smell?
Will be interesting to see how it plays out, I’m sure I’ll have one strapped on in the near future.
How about you?
Fetch Tweets: Could not authenticate you. Code: 32
I am thrilled with the data I have just got.
I am curious to know if there has been any development of VR treatments for stress, anxiety, depression, and learning disabilities (especially autism) for young children?
Hi Kevin. I don’t have much experience with treatments for these types of disabilities, I have personal experience as a parent for someone with a learning disorder. So a quick search for me indicated that VR treatment is something that has been experimented with in the past 20 years. Recently, the National Autistic Society published a video simulating autism through the eyes of a boy struggling with the disorder.
See that video here.
Here is a link to the Autism Research Institute where you can also subscribe to updates.
I found a few more articles here and here.
This is also a link to the profile of the Director for Medical VR at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
This article speaks about the Future of clinical VR.
So it seems that there is a lot of activity for helping treat these issues which so many people live with. Having used Virtual Reality now through the Gear VR, I see an incredible opportunity to take this existing research to a completely different level. Some of the more high-end headsets such as the Oculus Rift will have an even bigger impact due to an integrated audio experience through the headphones, better tracking capabilities. Then we have the Augmented Reality space that can similarly be used such as Microsoft’s Hololens. I think this is an exciting time for the medical profession in the sense of the technology is starting to catch up with what we have needed to help diagnose, treat and cure the issues that trouble us as humans. 3D printing, travelling through space more effectively, personal robots and teleporting could all be things we experience in our lifetimes.
Using technology to enhance, grow and heal is always something I support and also excited to see how it develops. People will always be paranoid of evil taking over technology to create things like SkyNet, but I am true believer of the goodness of the human spirit and that the amount of good people will always outweigh the number of evil and, eventually, we’ll all figure it out.
Thanks for the question as it got me looking into what is out there and it looks very promising.
Hi! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any trouble with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing many months of hard work due to no data backup. Do you have any methods to stop hackers?
Hi there – yes there are different methods of securing your site. Backups I use UpdraftPlus backups. Also see Hardening WordPress and Wordfence Security