The odds of you using Cardboard Camera, Google’s simple app for creating 360-degree VR images, just got significantly higher. The tool, which has so far only been available on Android, is now available on the iOS App Store. And both versions now include sharing features that realize the app’s raison d’etre: showing your friends and family the cool places you’ve visited. Where the old app made users share images through the generic Android photo gallery, the new one will support creating and sending links to either single images or collections.
Google’s VR Cardboard Camera app is coming to iOS
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
On a smartphone, the link prompts recipients to open the files with Cardboard Camera, or download the app if it’s not installed. They’ll be saved in a special “shared with you” tab, and you can view them in VR using a Cardboard headset, complete with recorded ambient audio.
As we’ve mentioned before, Cardboard Camera isn’t meant to be a professional-grade VR camera system. It’s like a VR version of Google’s Photo Spheres, stitching together images that it captures by asking you to rotate slowly and steadily in a circle. It’s a far cry from something like Google’s Jump camera platform, but it’s not bad even on things like my aging Android phone.
Just don’t look too far up or down while you’re viewing one of these images, or the illusion will start wearing thin. Google is widely expected to reveal more information about its new, Android-based Daydream VR platform at an event on October 4th, but this is another small signal that it’s not abandoning Cardboard — or iOS — in the process.
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