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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR, and given that for most people in the world their only computing device is their phone, this seems to be the fastest way to introduce VR to the widest audience possible.

That's why browser-based VR also makes a lot of sense, because all those phones have browsers and writing a VR app just means targeting the widest and most mature platforms out there.

A Cardboard experience won't match a mature HMD but that's alright. It allows people who wouldn't have any VR at least some rudimentary experience.

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>Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR for now, but what is your outlook on Google Tango[0] type devices starting to get wider adoption? It is my general assumption that both google and apple will soon ramp up production of devices with such hardware specs.

[0] https://get.google.com/tango/

>Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR

Why? Processing?

I cut out a hole for my phone's camera in my cardboard, was hoping to have the ability to "minimize" VR like minimizing a window and seeing your desktop background except it would be the camera so you could see someone without taking off your headset.

The "minimizing" VR world to show real-world is one that I want as well.

With AR in general, one would want to place virtual objects onto particular real-world locations. This requires depth-vision and mapping this into a (simplified) 3d-world. For interactive use it needs to be done real-time, requiring quite a lot of compute. The single camera available on standard smartphones is not enough hardware for this.

Maybe we will get stereo-cameras by standard. The megapixel race is over, the high-FPS/slowmo fight is happening now, maybe stereo/depth/3d will be next.

I'm not sure if lytro (can't quite recall the name) but the technology that captures a photo at various depths of field, if you had that for 360, and captured sound, you could travel around a spot/zoom/focus on things. I want that.

I get your point about one camera versus 2. It's probably cost maybe? Why they use spinning LiDAR's versus phased array (non-spinning). Though even if it phased you'd still need something that was like 360 anyway to get around.

I don't really understand the cardboard. Maybe I'm using it wrong. Does it provide any VR/3D feeling at all? Whenever I used it it only felt like a big zoom and the fact that you can move your head around, but I can just use my mouse wheel to zoom in and use my mouse to rotate around for almost the same effect.

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