10 of the best virtual reality apps for your smartphone

Get started with VR on your iPhone or Android phone with these 100 apps, spanning films, games, news and 360-degree photo-sharing

You don’t need to spend hundreds of pounds on an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset to give virtual reality a try.

The Android or iPhone handset in your pocket is a VR device in its own right too, especially when paired with a sub-£20 Google Cardboard headset that uses your phone as its screen and works with both Android and iOS.

If you’re getting started with VR on your smartphone, here are 10 of the best apps to explore. They’re regular Android and iOS apps rather than ones requiring Samsung’s Gear VR mobile headset – that’s a separate roundup in its own right for the future.

Note, the recently-launched Guardian VR app (Android / iOS) is not included in this roundup for reasons of fairness, but it’s worth a look: currently it has the Guardian’s first VR film, 6x9, which tells the story of the psychological damage of extreme isolation.

You Tube
Google Cardboard
VRSE
NYT VR
Sisters: A Virtual Reality Ghost Story
Orbulus
Seene
Jaunt VR
InCell VR
RYOT VR

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The complete guide to virtual reality – everything you need to get started

From Oculus Rift to Google Daydream, VR is getting plenty of hype. Which system should you go for, what do you need to buy, and what should you play?

Until recently, virtual reality had been something of a fantasy for storytellers and technologists. As long ago as 1935, American science fiction writer Stanley G Weinbaum described something like virtual reality in a short story called Pygmalion’s Spectacles.

“But listen – a movie that gives one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it. Would that be to make real a dream?”

Technologists might still be working on smell and taste, but Albert Ludwig’s “magic spectacles” eerily foreshadow the current prominence for headsets and 360-degree games, videos and virtual worlds.

Since Ludwig’s magic spectacles found their way into print, there have been decades of experimentation around virtual reality, from the first head-mounted VR system in the late 1960s to the first commercial products in the 1980s – not to mention Hollywood’s interpretation in the1992 film The Lawnmower Man, which shaped mainstream perceptions of virtual reality, or VR, for some time afterwards.

The current age of virtual reality began in 2010, when American teenager Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of a VR headset that would evolve into the Oculus Rift. Two years later, he launched a $250,000 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to commercialise it – and $2.4m of pledges later, the tech industry’s interest in VR was reborn. Two years after that, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, liked the Rift so much he bought the company for $2bn.

Several competitors have emerged since then, from the HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR to smartphone-powered headsets such as Samsung’s Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Meanwhile, hundreds of developers are making VR games and apps, film-makers are exploring the potential for documentaries and animation, and Facebook and YouTube have jumped on the bandwagon with 360-degree videos.

But if you’re new to virtual reality, where should you start? In the absence of a passing professor with magic specs, here’s everything you need to know about hardware, apps and games.

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NASA shows the world its 20 year Virtal Reality experiment to train Astronauts: The inside story

NASA's Johnson Space Center told TechRepublic the whole story behind one of the most important tools it uses to train astronauts: virtual reality. Learn how the agency pulled off VR's greatest triumph.

For the first time, astronaut Doug Wheelock hung on to a handrail outside the International Space Station (ISS), and looked down at the Earth.

"I know exactly where I am," he thought. "It looks just like the VR Lab."

That familiarity is a quick comfort not only for Wheelock, but for many astronauts past, present, and future, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth, trying to get a job done in one of the most hostile working environments imaginable.

In space, an astronaut's next minutes are never guaranteed. They have to adjust to the drastically modified rules of physics, and to a calmness and a slowness that masks danger.

Inside Wheelock's spacesuit, he was aware of the frightening silence of space, broken only by the voices coming in through his communications cap, the ventilation system of his suit, and his own heartbeat. Outside, temperatures were fluctuating between 300 degrees Fahrenheit and negative 300 degrees in 90-minute cycles.

Space is beautiful—but unforgiving.

Wheelock knew it would be like this.

His preparation from the Virtual Reality Lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center was both mental and physical.

As the spacewalk—or extra vehicular activity (EVA)—turns 50 in 2015, its history is inextricably linked to the development and use of a technology that's long been derided as a toy.

For as long as virtual reality has existed, even conceptually, its constant companions have been hype, gimmickry, and unmet expectations. While the commercial VR industry has waited for another shot at world domination, Johnson Space Center's VR Lab doggedly worked on ways to better train astronauts for one of the most dangerous excursions of their lives.

Virtual reality has matured and developed into a mission-critical training tool. NASA has pushed a number of different technologies to their limits to pull it off, without the glare of industry expectations or the pressure of packaging it into a consumer product. Their solution isn't flashy, but it's immensely powerful. And it works.

The main reason for the success of NASA's VR experiment is ridiculously obvious—there's no other way to replicate space here on Earth.

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From AI To Robotics, 2016 Will Be The Year When The Machines Start Taking Over

For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And, as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The convergence of these technologies is making amazing things possible.

2015 was the tipping point in the global adoption of the Internet, digital medical devices, blockchain, gene editing, drones, and solar energy. 2016 will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future. Yes, with every good there is a bad; wonderful things will become possible, but with them we will also create new problems for mankind.

Here are six of the technologies that will make this happen, and the good they will do.

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Robots
3. Self Driving Cars
4. Virtual reality and holodecks
5. Internet of Things
6. Space

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