Google ships five million Cardboard virtual reality devices

Alphabet’s Google said it had shipped 5 million units of the Google Cardboard viewer, a wearable device that allows users to experience virtual reality through mobile apps. The company, which launched the Cardboard viewer a year and a half earlier, said on Wednesday that there had been 25 million downloads of Cardboard apps from its Google Play app store. Google has been exploring virtual reality for a while but the company dived into the concept this month by setting up a new division for virtual reality computing. Oculus, the virtual reality company Facebook bought in 2014, started accepting pre-orders this month for its much-awaited headset, Rift, which will ship in first quarter. Google said in November that its video-sharing site, YouTube, supported virtual reality videos. Viewers can watch virtual reality videos using a mobile device and the Google Cardboard viewer. Google said more than 350,000 hours of YouTube videos had been watched in virtual reality. A recent report claimed that developers working with Google Cardboard apps can now create realistic sounds the way humans experience them like when a fire truck zooms by or when an airplane is overhead. Google had announced that the Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android support spatial audio so developers can create immersive audio experiences in their virtual reality (VR) apps. Users will not need any additional equipment, just their smartphone, a regular pair of headphones and a Google Cardboard viewer, explains Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Google Cardboard in a blog. With input from Reuters