What is Reddit's opinion of Titans of Space® Cardboard VR?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

No reason to downvote this, it's true. There is currently no way to run Gear VR software on any phone besides the Note 4 and Galaxy S6(edge). And even on these it only works with Gear VR, which provides external, USB connected sensors for which the Oculus SDK checks when launching an app. The Open Gear project tries to create an alternative by building a compatible sensor set and later finding a way to run the software on other phones than the Note 4/S6, but so far they haven't come very far, and it may never work. "No" may be a somewhat short answer, but it is still the correct answer. Only apps ported by the developers from Gear VR to Cardboard SDK like Titans of Space will work on other phones.

There's a vr app on android which takes you on a journey across the solar system + known biggest stars..

It really freaked me out looking at the sheer magnitude & luminance!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

The guided voice addon is just cherry on top!

Titans of Space stands head and shoulders above the rest of the stuff I've tried. Especially if you're interested in the solar system, check it out.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb&hl=en

Titans of Space https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

Vrse- Evolution of Verse. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shakingearthdigital.vrsecardboard

Here you go :)

I'm not particularly fond of in-app purchases but after the first tour I decided to buy the narration add-on ($2.99). Feels good to support the work and honestly it's adds a lot to the experience.

Titans of Space is a really good one that started as an experience for the Rift. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

I liked this for the cinema feeling if you want to watch a movie. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.couchgames.apps.cardboardcinema

You can also find a bunch of 360 videos on Youtube now that are cardboard compatible if you click the icon on the video.

/r/cardboard and /r/GoogleCardboard/ are subs you can check out for more :)

Try Titans of Space and VR Design Lab by Google.

Edit: Here are the links: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.vr.cardboard.apps.designlab&hl=en

If you like this and you get the opportunity, check out Titans of Space

It's a 3d Virtual Reality tour of the universe.
There's a Google Cardboard version available here

The VR aspect of it really drives home the scale of things in a way that's hard to grasp on a monitor.

Titans of Space does something similar to what you describe. It's made in Unity and runs okay on Android. Making the right design decisions and optimisations for mobile in Unity takes a little experience, but what you are describing isn't beyond it's capabilities by any means.

Hijacking this comment to point this out if it was missed: if OP just wants 'VR on the cheap', Google Cardboard or the plastic kits that mimic it is where it's at.

There are apps out there like this, which lets you fly through space and view astronomical objects.

EDIT: wording

Try it on Google Cardboard first to get a taste (You'll need an Android smartphone I'm afraid):

App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

Cardboard viewer: https://www.amazon.com/Google-87002822-01-Official-Cardboard/dp/B01L92Z8D6

Edit: Link to official site with more download options: http://www.titansofspacevr.com/oldindex.php#downloads

To …

• visit places. ([Street view for Cardboard](/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/2qzm40/apps_with_the_wow_factor/cnb23b2))
• meet people. ([Social VR](/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/38pugi/how_to_get_into_social_vr_spaces_with_cardboard/))
• take a look around. (YouTube 360°)
• explore space. (Titans of Space/Android)
• build worlds. ([Minecraft with Cardboard](/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/3bd6rm/how_to_play_minecraft_in_virtual_reality_using/))
• get scared. (Sisters: A Virtual Reality Ghost Story iOS, Android)
• save lives. (Cardboard used for planing heart surgery)
• make people cry. ([Osmose VR art installation by Char Davies] (/r/oculus/comments/2wpfwd/alex_vlachos_valve_vr_dev_vr_pro_tip_falling/cot61yr))
• educate. (Google Expeditions)
• create even stranger things. (VR in Unity3D)
• have fun.

Titans of Space

I've taken a stab at putting captioning/subtitles into two VR experiences so far. I don't claim these as proper solutions going forward, but it was enough to realize that it's not simple to do, so here are my findings/opinions:

Generally, if the action is straight ahead, it seems best to just have the subtitles fixed in space ahead of you (and downward a little to avoid occluding the action). It's important to not force the player to constantly re-focus at different depths in order to watch the action + read the captioning, so the caption distance is something that should match the situation.

You definitely should not have the captions appear farther away than any scene elements drawn underneath it. At the same time, it also can't be too close due to eyestrain that results from the mismatch between focus and vergence. This means if you're in a cramped space, you may be better off including the captioning as part of the world somehow.

Now, if instead the action is all around you, then it seems best to have the captions follow the player's gaze. It's nice to introduce a little bit of follow lag to avoid the stuck-to-the-face sensation. Placement is even more tricky here because you can't have the text too far away from the gaze direction, otherwise it's a strain to read. And of course, not too close to the center of the gaze to avoid occluding the action.

Something I didn't play with yet is a combination of the above two approaches. If you have an experience where the action takes place in different directions from time to time, is to have the captioning for a given phrase show up in world space in front of the player and then smoothly swivel toward the action (if the action isn't within the player's field of view). This ensures the player never misses the subtitles, and always knows where the action is. That last bit is likely to be especially helpful for those that can't hear the audio cues that may otherwise be responsible for directing the player's attention.

If you'd like to see some of this yourself, you can see examples of some of these subtitle approaches in the Apollo 11 concept demo for DK2, and in Titans of Space for Cardboard (there's a narration option, along with subtitles). Still trying to find the time to bring the Narration feature over to GearVR/DK2, sorry.

Check out Titans of Space.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

I'm pretty sure the final Daydream SDK will only run on Android N, I just referred to the Android 5 hack as an indicator that controller support doesn't depend on the OS version. It is up to Google to officially add it to Cardboard SDK. The reasons for this are more strategical than technical.

The lack of clarity regarding what Daydream is and isn't is either a major fail or intentional. My guess is the later, and partly because I expect Daydream and Cardboard to be or become closer than it currently seems. Only this is something Google cannot admit right now, otherwise Daydream would be labeled as "Cardboard plus", an impression they have to avoid.

It will take a lot of time for Daydream to come anywhere close to the numbers of Cardboard, so my guess is that we will end up with kind of a transition, with the Cardboard SDK gaining a number of features from Daydream. They cannot simply drop or neglect Cardboard, otherwise they'd lose the giant mobile VR install base they created by tossing out cheap lens holders made out of paper. And somehow Google has to allow developers to target both Daydream and Cardboard at the same time, as distributing development costs over both platforms will reduce the financial risk.

Epic Games' VR and augmented reality technical director Nick Whiting hinted at a rather smooth transition when talking about Daydream/Cardboard support in UE4:

> If you enable this plugin and deploy your app, and it's not [running] on a Daydream qualified device, it'll fall back to basically Cardboard-level support. […] A lot of people developed applications [in Unreal Engine 4] and wanted to deploy on Cardboard. This opens up the door to that."

Apps like Titans of Space are available on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung GearVR and Google Cardboard. Obviously performance differs with platform, and /u/DrashVR 's blog is full of useful informations regarding porting/optimizing for mobile VR, but it is doable. There is no reason why at least some Daydream apps couldn't be released in a Cardboard version too, the only "hard" difference being Daydream controller support. Which is why expect that Google will support it on Cardboard some time after Daydream is out and they have established that this is a platform in the Gear VR league and not just Cardboard v3.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

https://www.vrheads.com/how-play-google-cardboard-games-using-google-daydream

Titans of Space is pretty good.

TItans of Space- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb&hl=en

InMind VR- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nivalvr.inmind&hl=en

Maybe Titans of Space? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

I thought this guide to planets and stars was amazing as 3D gives you a much better idea of just how big they are!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

Oh, sorry.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

That is a lot of rather meaningless marketing speech from a company promoting their own VR platform for education. I'm a very big proponent of both e-learning and VR, and there are great things that can be done by combining both, but the article just repeats some generic claims and most of them out of context. Yes, people learn better with multi-sensoric input, by experiencing something for themselves, but a) we are very far from anything resembling the haptic input that would be required for this, currently VR is mostly visual and auditory input, and b) basically everything claimed would be true for non-VR educational software too, so we should already have seen huge improvements in the last few years.

Early CBT (computer based training) systems have been around for almost 50 years, there were several big waves in the 80s on home computers, in the 90s on multimedia PCs and in the 00s with web based training. We are still riding the wave of blended learning and MOOCs (massive open online courses). E-learning has its uses and niches, but all the claims about the revolution it would cause in education were completely overblown. In theory any interactive medium should be better than a book or video, and in some ways this is true. A video tutorial may be easier to follow than just a textual description, and a simulation gives a much better impression than just watching a video. But this mostly applies to a certain type of complex system that is hard to describe, but easy to see, e.g. explaining how a 3D printer works.

In reality text is still pretty hard to beat when it comes to describe larger, complex subjects like history, as it allows expressing reasons and conditions that cannot be visualized. Walking through a virtual medieval village will teach you nothing about politics, and as great as Titans of Space is as a VR experience, most people will at best remember that there are pretty huge objects in space. Any real information inside the experience is again given as text (or voice-over). So the basic assumption that "everything is better in VR" is simply false. Some situations that require complex interactions in real life can gain tremendously from VR, e.g. surgeon training, but these require a fairly expensive setup. Neither math nor physics nor history nor English literature can be taught better in VR than on a regular screen, and often a paper book or an interactive e-book will work better due to the higher information density and the option to easily reread passages, skip ahead, use the index etc.

I've been involved with e-learning for a long time and wrote my first trainer for Latin vocabulary as a teenager about 30 years ago. I've worked with a lot of content creators and spoken to many more, and besides the "it doesn't work all that well", this resulted in two major insights:

• Making something interesting is very hard. Even if the goal is only to entertain, game developers regularly fail to produce something that people want to use. There was a big interest in edutainment and "serious games", because people assumed that making educational content game like would get people to willingly learn. This failed spectacularly, and today mentioning "edutainment" in the games industry is a fast way to get kicked out. Very few people are willing to go to a museum, so assuming that they will suddenly want to use a rather bad VR copy of it just because they can isn't particularly plausible. Most likely they will still prefer watching Netflix.
• Making e-learning content is ridiculously expensive. It is already very expensive to create text books. Adding illustrations makes it a lot more expensive, as while pretty much all the experts on a subject can write a textual description, very few can create matching drawings, so external help is required. Describing the development of a population over time takes a few minutes to write, much longer to create a diagram, and unless you already have the proper tools or libraries, creating an interactive diagram with a time slider could take weeks. I've seen projects that spent months on writing small simulations that provided almost no additional insight over a simple drawing plus description. Modeling the Colosseum in VR to allow students to explore it will take a long time, the experience can be very impressive, but two pages of well written text with a couple of stock photos will probably provide a lot more knowledge.

As long as production costs are so high, VR will have to be limited to a few selected areas. And even in these it will be an addition to traditional media, which will cover most of the actual knowledge, with VR providing a way to experience certain aspects of what has been described before in e.g. text form. We already have problems to finance our educational sectors, and in most areas introducing VR will be a waste of money and time, similar to adding computers to classrooms without a solid concept and matching software. The money spend on these had to be cut somewhere else, and many teachers had to waste a lot of time to get or keep the computers running instead of teaching.

Again, I am a big fan of VR for e-learning, but it has to make sense. The major advantage of any type of e-learning could be adapting content to each individual student, i.e. something is explained in a more detailed or more practical way for those who have problems with the concepts, but we haven't even started to really try this yet. So far e-learning mostly means "using a computer as a presentation medium" with very little flexibility for the learners. Simply claiming that VR will revolutionize education because it allows simulation and addresses more senses is dangerously naive. It may be great to get someone interested in the first place, but it isn't necessarily great to convey detailed information.

If you take off your case it fits fine. This was the app I tried first https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb

You can!

ChYeahyuh! #GetChuSum!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drashvr.titansofspacecb&hl

Personally, I think they should've sold it. Cardboard users will pay for Rift apps.