See Street View In Virtual Reality With Google Cardboard

Google shared today that its virtual reality experience Google Cardboard is now available in 39 languages and over 100 countries for both Android and iOS. Google Unity 3D apps can be adapted for virtual reality as well. The apps are believed to have originated from China and have been repackaged using the same name and icon of the safe Android apps, including WiFi Enhancer, Calculator and Talking Tom 3, now available on the Google Play Store. The tech company released its designs which can be downloaded from their website.

Those rocking Cardboard headsets won’t have to wait for the update to roll out, because it was featured as part of Google’s last Streetview tweak, which dropped last week. This should diminish the amount of “drift” wherein the displayed images continue to move even after your head has stopped turning. This particular update will see a major overhaul of the sensor fusion algorithms that integrate the signals from the gyroscope and accelerometer, and as these improvements will substantially decrease drift, especially on phones with lower-quality sensors. The Cardboard SDK for Unity now improves performance by supporting a Unity-native distortion pass and avoiding plug-in overhead, said Wuest.

Along those same lines, this update to the SDK allows for multi-threaded rendering on Android.

If you prefer to view permissions on a per-app basis rather than a per-feature basis, go to Settings Apps, tap an app’s name, then tap App permissions.

In a post on the company blog (via VentureBeat), Google wrote: “Finally, to help bring you to more places, you can now explore Google Street View in Cardboard”. Once that is done, they will just have to insert their smartphones on the VR wearable.