Wandering the halls of ACM Siggraph is always interesting and you know that you WILL find new technology and you know that you WILL be wowed but you don’t know that that thing will resemble a craft your kid brought home from daycare. Don’t get me wrong, I was wowed by many pieces of technology that had nothing to do with arts and crafts though, lets face it, Siggraph is kind of the top of the world for Geek-Meets-Artist so it’s not that far of a stretch if I was really wowed by simply the arts side.
The technological advances that are showcased are incredible and quite frankly mind blowing at times which is one of the reasons I think the simple things like Google’s Cardboard really stand out in an Expo hall filled with lights and shiny things. There amongst the many flashy displays was Cardboard, just plain old Cardboard. Naturally this is what caught my eye because it, in it’s drab and dull way, it was what stood out. In first trying Cardboard out I have to admit I felt nostalgic in that more than anything it reminded me of a Viewmaster. That little slider on the side that you get to pull down every time you want to see a new picture on a Viewmaster is much like, or at least it felt like, the magnetic slider on Cardboard. Looking though the little plastic eye-holes into another world held that same bit of throw back to my youth but that’s pretty much where it all stops with the Viewmaster comparison because from there on you are now basically using an Oculus made from a cereal box:)
I took a lovely stroll through a windy forest and met a mouse chasing his hat ’cause … why not?! I was pretty impressed with this little techless piece of cardboard engineering, well I suppose it’s not techless as it certainly requires a great deal of tech to make it interesting. If you haven’t seen or heard of this cool little toy put out by Google then I’m just going to tell you to go out there and check it out. Do I predict this is the next big thing? No, but I do think that it certainly has opened my eyes to just how accessible many areas of the tech industry actually are? Definitely, I wouldn’t have ever imagined that something like this could be constructed so simply and made so accessible to the masses. It’s pretty cool to see what’s in store for us in the immersive technologies industry, Siggraph was full of bright minds, budding new technologies and so many existing technologies that are just being improved upon and very much in the early stages of what will undoubtedly become staple household entertainment platforms in not too long. One thing is clear … technology is amazing whether we access it via fiberoptics or (I can’t believe I’m saying this) … cardboard.
Check out Cardboard here https://developers.google.com/cardboard/ to see how it works.
And who knows … you might find the entertainment of waiting for the app to download as entertaining as the use itself …
