creating a panoramic spherical view in android's cardboard

Question

I've been wanting to create an android's cardboard app, in which the user enters a spherical panoramic view of some panoramic picture I've taken, and that I could gather data about where the user is looking in the process. I've seen the "Cardboard Demo" provided by google, they have a feature called "photo sphere" in which the user can view photos exactly the way I want, but I want to implement it differently.

Can anyone give me some direction on how such a panormaic viewer with cardboard?

Answer 1

I was also trying to build the same kind of app. You can do a Skybox implementation in Opengl.(Cube mapping)

As you said, if you already have panorama image, then you can map the same to a Sphere.

You can Refer this Blog

Answer 2

I have ended up using Google's Cardboard SDK for Unity.

Basic idea :

1. Get Unity.

https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download

2. Get Google CardBoard

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/

3. Download the following SDK for unity

https://github.com/googlesamples/cardboard-unity

4. Try first to get the CardBoard/DemoScene (It's in the previous link) running on your app. Use this link for guidance :

https://developers.google.com/cardboard/unity/get-started

5. The DemoScene is basically a 3D game for Google cardboard, you can start by loading that project into unity and playing around with the different elements. From here it's pure unity, you can use the cardboard elements (They are the only important thing here, and define two offset cameras that are synced with the movement of the phone for 3d viewing of the cardboard) from the DemoScene project and create your own scene.

6. As due to gathering data on where the user is looking at , I extracted the angles of the cardboard camera objects on unity.

Good Luck!