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!]