| Google Cardboard Gets New Unity SDK |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Tuesday, 16 June 2020 |
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Google has released a Unity SDK for Cardboard, Google's virtual reality platform based on a combination of a cardboard fold-out viewer that fits onto a smartphone. Google said last year it would open source Cardboard, and discontinued its own development of the platform. The new SDK for the Unity 3D is available via the Unity Asset Store.The Unity SDK means Cardboard developers can create smartphone XR experiences for Cardboard using Unity, one of the most popular 3D and XR development platforms in the world. In case you are unfamiliar with it, XR an umbrella term, encompassing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) applications and you can find definitions of these technologies in this recent article.
In the game, users look around a virtual world to find and collect objects. It shows how to set up a development environment and download and build the demo app. There's also code for scanning the QR code of a Cardboard viewer to save its parameters, tracking the user’s head movements, and rendering stereoscopic images by setting the correct view projection matrix for each eye. The SDK supports a number of VR features, including motion tracking, stereoscopic rendering, and user interaction via the viewer button. Google made clear in the announcement about the new SDK that it has moved on, saying: "This release not only fulfills a promise we made to our Cardboard community, but also shows our support, as we move away from smartphone VR and leave it in the more-than-capable hands of our development community." The source code for the Cardboard SDK is available in the Google VR GitHub repo.
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 16 June 2020 ) |
As part of the release of the Unity SDK, Google has created a sample application for iOS/Android, which they say "will be a great aid for developers trying to debug their own creations."