YouTube started offering 360-degree videos earlier this year, but now the app has been updated with full support for Cardboard-compatible VR viewers. Didn’t that already happen? Yes, it did. Apparently it’s better now? In addition, you can watch any video in Cardboard, even if it wasn’t filmed for full VR.
YouTube has a playlist of fully 360-degree content, which will show a small Cardboard icon next to the full screen toggle. Just tap that and drop the phone into your viewer, and you’ll be able to look around and experience the video in VR. The camera rigs to do this are expensive, so there’s not a lot of content yet. This looks exactly like what we saw in June, so it’s not clear to me that there are any user-facing changes.
The second part of YouTube’s VR announcement is that you can load up any existing video in a Cardboard-friendly UI. This is definitely new for YouTube. This option is in the overflow option menu when watching a video. It shrinks down the video and mirrors it on both halves of the screen. It looks like the phone is hovering about a foot in front of your face.
Both these options are in the new YouTube update (10.43.60), which we added to APK Mirror yesterday. I’m seeing it on devices updated through the Play Store too, though.
- Source:
- YouTube Blog