By If you gave Macgyver a cardboard box, lab goggles and a cell phone he would probably make a heat-seeking boomerang bomb that would destroy his enemies and return in the form of a taxicab to take him home. But sometimes great minds DON’T think alike: Andrew Lim from Recombu.com took those same items to make Android Virtual Reality Goggles:
The idea is to utilize Google Street View with the Android Compass while blocking out all other surroundings besides your phone’s screen, essentially simulating your eyesight. The main problem is that while you can rotate your head and get a 360 degree view, to take “steps” you have to press a button on the touchscreen which – for obvious reasons – will not work with this ghetto VR simulator.
This is the farthest thing from practical and while its pretty funny, don’t be fooled and thing this is 100% dumb. In a few years you might see an integration like this hit the mass market and become incredibly popular. Combine this concept with “game layers” like you may have seen on our Layar 3D post and I think you’ll see what we mean.
I guess you would need a REALLY open place to use that, otherwise you’ll be running into walls and sprinting through rush hour traffic as you try to blindly navigate through a visual world that has no connection to your physical location. Wait… is this the Matrix?
[Thanks Kevin!]
“I guess you would need a REALLY open place to use that, otherwise you’ll be running into walls and sprinting through rush hour traffic as you try to blindly navigate through a visual world that has no connection to your physical location.”
That’s not the case at all. If it functioned like Layar, something you mentioned, and worked along with the camera to show you a real-time image of the world around you with some sort of augmented reality image laid over it, like zombies walking around, then you’d be fine. Or there could be a few hidden spy contacts that you need to find and interact with. Lots of possibilities.
This dude needs a patent!
this will be very nice to be used with “augmented reality” software from “sprxmobiles layar”
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/17/video-sprxmobiles-layar-is-worlds-first-augmented-reality-bro/
fail but really funny! I would have laughed at myself if I made this
ha! he should make that part of his halloween costume and dress up like an android
They have android pedometers already, right? So wire the pedometer output into the streetview input to get the steps to work. This would probably require hacking streetview, which would be hard since the source is not available.
(A more sophisticated pedometer would be necessary to account for the direction of the steps.)
If you could have a transparent screen and use the google street view as a HUD, now THAT is starting to sound pretty damn cool. Basically like wearing glasses with street view overlayed.
Notice behind him the wine bottles he emptied the day he thought up this rig…
Why not get an image from the camera, then layer stuff on top of that.
if this can somehow be combined with Stereographic views, in which the image focus is set behind the screen you effectively do not focus ‘on screen’ but behind it, then this would really feel like real, i am not sure if anyone ever has done this but you could look up for “Stereograms” on google, this dude has an amazing idea.