Remember when foaming soap wasn’t a thing? You’d be in a public restroom, go to wash your hands and have to, what, create the lather yourself? I can’t imagine a world without it now, but back in 2003, I was in the bathroom of a devastatingly hip restaurant on San Antonio’s famed Riverwalk and I encountered foaming soap for the first time. I swear to you, the thought I had was this is going to change everything. And boy-howdy did it ever. Overnight it was foaming soap everywhere, to the point now, if you’re like me, you encounter non-foaming soap in a public restroom and you snort and guffaw and scream what is this horseshit?
I had another moment like that the other night at a friend’s party, a moment where something new was happening and I knew it was important and monumental, where I wasn’t sure if things would ever be quite the same.
Like any party, there were a half-dozen conversations going at once, a cube of cheap beer, people milling and mingling. And then the host produced what looked like cardboard goggles and slid his phone into one end.
He passed it around with the simple command to put it up to your eyes and look around. “What is it?” I asked. “It’s the world changing,” he said. I laughed but he was kind of serious.
The contraption was Google Cardboard, which my friend had received unsolicited recently in his Sunday New York Times. After downloading a special app, Cardboard – consisting of two cheap plastic lenses and the aforementioned cardboard goggles that act as rudimentary blinders – transforms your smartphone into a no-joke virtual reality machine.
And it completely and single-handedly took over the party.
Using special cameras that shoot 360 degrees, the videos allow viewers on a computer to pan up, down, left and right, essentially allowing users to control the camera. Viewing these 360-degree videos through Cardboard is an entirely different experience, allowing you to “look around” the scene as if you are actually there, immersed.
One video we took turns watching was a helicopter flying over New York City. Friends clamored for a turn with it, putting this thing up to their face, oohing, aahing, mouths agape, jaws on the floor. “Give it to so-and-so to try next,” I heard people bark. Some would look through it and just marvel motionless at what they saw. “Look up! Look down!” people shouted.
“It’s mind blowing … it’s insane,” my friend said. But then he caught himself. No, it’s not really, he said. It’s your phone, a cardboard box and a couple lenses, made so cheaply that The New York Times sent it out to more than 1 million people, giving virtually anyone the chance to experience people and places unlike they ever have before.
Putting virtual reality so easily into the hands of millions of people has plenty of implications. It will be interesting to see if it stays an awe-inducing technological novelty, or if it is used for something bigger.
Already the Times is using 360-degree videos in its news reporting, and seen through a device like Cardboard, they have the power to put viewers as close to the story as you can get without being there. One video shows life at a Syrian refugee camp. The level of empathy achieved through such experiences will undoubtedly connect us to issues and people in more meaningful and transformative ways.
Maybe we’ll look back in 10 years and see that such personal VR was a passing fad. Or maybe such contraptions will be laughably rudimentary. But the possibilities appear endless, territories uncharted. My guess is that we’ll be immersed, unable to remember what life was like before it.
David Holub is the editor for DGO. [email protected].
