Google Cardboard App Now Available in Over 100 Countries in 39 Languages.

Google on Monday detailed its virtual reality expansion plans and announced that its Cardboard app is now available in 39 languages and over 100 countries on both Android and iOS platforms. It added that the Cardboard developer documents are now also available in 10 languages and that the app until now has seen over 15 million installs from Google Play. The firm separately announced that the Google Street View is now available for Cardboard as well.
Giving details on the Cardboard SDKs, the company blog post mentioned that the Cardboard SDKs for Android and Unity have now been updated to "address your top two requests: drift correction and Unity performance." Google says that this update includes a "major overhaul" of the sensor fusion algorithms that integrate the signals from the gyroscope and accelerometer.
Furthermore, these improvements are supposed to decrease drift, especially on phones with lower-quality sensors. The Cardboard SDK for Unity now supports a fully Unity-native distortion pass. "This improves performance by avoiding all major plugin overhead, and enables Cardboard apps to work with Metal rendering on iOS and multi-threaded rendering on Android."
Besides this, Google will let you explore Google Street View in Cardboard. However, you would need to download the Google Street View app for Android or iOS and then view the content via the Cardboard. "With Cardboard available in more places, we're hoping to bring the world just a little bit closer to everyone. Happy exploring!" Google said on its blog.
The search giant introduced its low-priced DIY Cardboard during the Google I/O conference last year. Since then Google Cardboard has seen competition from several other tech companies including OnePlus, Microsoft, Sony, HTC, and others.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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