Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/fast-food-packaging-influenced-mobile-virtual-reality/
One year ago, my two oldest Berlin friends, Tom Kubischik and Nayden Naydenov contacted me. Nayden had claimed to make Virtual Reality possible on smartphones.
Tom and Nayden both work in the gaming industry, Tom as a large-scale project-manager for “Morgen Studios” and Nayden as a genius developer.
In the 90s I was working in the VR department of the Fraunhofer Institute IPK in Berlin. One of the biggest problems in Virtual Realty in those days was the huge and expensive setup you needed to show your work. I think this was the reason Virtual Reality never had the Impact it could have had in its early years. For me it was the motivation to concentrate more on other fields of design in the following years.
Back to the invention. Nayden had conceived a 3D printed box with two lenses in which you could insert a smartphone, thus converting it into a head-mounted-display (HMD) and enabling you to dive into virtual realty. A real-time animation split side by side into two screens was visible on the display, giving the impression of sitting in a roller coaster, racing along the track.
It was a phenomenal experience, standing in a room and having the impression of being in the scene, cable-less and with only the help of a regular phone.
The possibility of Virtual Reality on a smartphone was an immediate game-changer for me, I was hooked again.
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