Virtual reality on your smartphone – Do it yourself (DIY) Guide! Google developers made this awesome DIY kit!I thought this was awesome and a great idea.

Virtual reality has made exciting progress over the past several years. However, developing for VR still requires expensive, specialized hardware. Thinking about how to make VR accessible to more people, a group of VR enthusiasts at Google experimented with using a smartphone to drive VR experiences.

The result is Cardboard, a no-frills enclosure that transforms a phone into a basic VR headset, and the accompanying open software toolkit that makes writing VR software as simple as building a web or mobile app.

By making it easy and inexpensive to experiment with VR, we hope to encourage developers to build the next generation of immersive digital experiences and make them available to everyone.

Download the do it yourself-Virtual reality toolkit here

Google had an event and a talk about “Material design principles”. Though very nerdy I thought it was very interesting thus it’s also what I do in my ComputerArts.dk company – I love working with design and arguing about why we choose to use the design we chose is a very interesting debate.

This is basically mostly interesting for other designers working with usability and UX design and passionated people who work with the analysis and psychology of design and functionality.

About the video Material design principles:

Matias Duarte, Nicholas Jitkoff, Jonathan Lee, Christian Robertson, Jon Wiley all talked about Material design in this video.

Design is the art of considered creation. As designers, our goal is to satisfy the diverse spectrum of human needs. As those needs evolve, so too must our designs, practices, and philosophies.

We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. The result is material design: a cross-platform design system grounded in tactile reality, inspired by our study of paper and ink, yet open to imagination and magic.

In this session, design leads across Google discuss the key principles of material design, and set the stage for the later sessions focusing on interaction, motion and visual design.

Other interesting Google design videos and Google talks

Designing for wearables
Emmet Connolly, Alex Faaborg, Hayes Raffle, Bob Ryskamp

Going responsive with the Google Play Apps Suite
Kirill Grouchnikov, Marco Paglia

Material design: Structure and components
Dave Chiu, Bethany Fong, Rich Fulcher, Zachary Gibson

Material design in Google Play
Will Kiefer, Nathan Streu, Taddeo Zacchini