Google ramps up 3-D focus on Cardboard viewer

Cardboard boxes have long captured the imagination of children, and now a 3-D virtual reality viewer dubbed Cardboard has Google’s focused energy behind it.

At its I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday, the search-engine giants announced several initiatives to promote the View Master-esque cardboard – yes, it’s cardboard – viewer to smartphone and YouTube fans who want to see videos rendered in 3-D.    

The simplistic viewer – a cardboard box with a wedge to sit on a nose and plastic lenses and a magnet – is designed to be inexpensive option for virtual-reality fans on a budget; it costs about $4.

First introduced last year, Google’s efforts to bring Cardboard to a larger audience include the development of a software kit that will make it easier to put the Cardboard app on iPhones.

Read more from The New York Times.