When Google announced a do-it-yourself virtual reality kit made of cardboard at its I/O developer conference this week, one of the first questions people asked was: Is this a big joke? ... Turns out, Google is using cheap, corrugated paper to give virtual reality its neatest and most accessible tool for converting nonbelievers. While it's no Oculus Rift headset, Google's Cardboard initiative has a huge role to play in VR by putting it in the hands of anyone with $25 and a smartphone.
VR is supposed to change everything: film, gaming, communication, travel, education -- even what we understand about sensory experience itself. ...
Announced as part of Google's annual product giveaway at I/O, Cardboard is a meant to be a super-low-cost, crowdsourced toolkit anyone can build to run elementary VR experiences. Essentially, it's a cardboard housing for a smartphone running Google's Android mobile OS. You get a $10 lens kit, about $7 in off-the-shelf magnets, $3 worth of velcro, a rubber band, and an easily programmable $1.50 Near-Field Communication sticker tag for launching the companion mobile app automatically. ...
The result is a low-key yet completely usable headset that's good enough to hand to a stranger and have them experience a genuine VR revelation. In fact, countless people -- at San Francisco's Moscone Center and here, too, at CNET's headquarters -- who have never had the opportunity to try on a Rift have been holding up Cardboard's goofy-looking smartphone mount and walking away thinking VR might not be so crazy after all.
They also say it may just be the coolest tech they've played with in a while.
Google's Cardboard app, which is what plays on the phone screen while it sits in the cardboard casing, lets you cruise through a landscape or city street in Google Earth and watch YouTube videos in a virtual theater. Even wackier Web-based experiences -- what Google is calling Chrome Experiments -- let you play a simple coin-collecting game, visit the Great Barrier Reef in a helicopter, and ride a roller coaster. That only one of the more than a dozen apps you can access with Cardboard is game-related is a boon for VR too, proving that you can design worthwhile and interesting experiences in a first-person view.
"Developing for VR still requires expensive, specialized hardware," Google writes on its dedicated Cardboard developers page. "Thinking about how to make VR accessible to more people, a group of VR enthusiasts at Google experimented with using a smartphone to drive VR experiences."
"By making it easy and inexpensive to experiment with VR, we hope to encourage developers to build the next generation of immersive digital experiences and make them available to everyone," Google concludes.
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Originally Posted by Roland
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about 6 months ago someone told me about a teaching platform that he uses to teach Tai Chi where everyone is live and can interact from their spaces. I don't know if there were videos stored for later review but I'm sure that can be done so that every time zone can have access. But it's still not as cool as the Holo Zendo that's just awesome 
only 2500 to 5000 a day. But surely there will soon be webcam like things like these. 
