Google Daydream has proved to be elusive for most Android users, much less iOS users, and is only compatible with Google’s Pixel and Motorola’s Moto Z smartphones. While the Moto Z family (excluding the Moto Z Play series) was a recent addition, it sounds like Google has no immediate plans to support iOS. According to statements Clay Bavor made to The Verge back in May:
for the foreseeable future, iOS isn’t part of Google’s Daydream plans. Getting good enough performance, Bavor says, requires changes “at all levels of the operating system” — it’s not as easy as porting Gmail or Google Maps over to the iPhone.
In this day and age with modding and hacks, that statement pretty much equates into a challenge. Matteo Pisani, CTO and co-founder of Remoria VR, took it upon himself to reverse engineer a Daydream controller. The process was quite technical as you can imagine, and Pisani started off first by using an app called BlueCap to get his iPhone to recognize the Daydream controller and he was able to start seeing incoming data packets in real time.
After some more investigation, Pisani figured out that this masked data included accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, touchpad, button, and other data. Next came the reverse engineering and figuring out how to actually extract and use that data and after a few failed attempts, he was successful in getting the Daydream controller data to read correctly on his iPhone. He also found that the packets per second on the iPhone were more than enough to facilitate a VR game or 3D experience smoothly.
Check out the Daydream controller running on iOS in the video below:
While the controller hasn’t been tested with VR apps, the fact that Pisani was able to connect it and show it functioning on an iOS device is pretty promising. What’s even more impressive is that he used an iPhone 5 for this work and not the current iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. This indicates that the Daydream controller could also be hacked to work with versions of Android other than the required Nougat 7.0. Check out the link below for a fuller explanation of the process he took.
What do you think about the Daydream controller being hacked to work on iOS? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”https://hackernoon.com/how-i-hacked-google-daydream-controller-c4619ef318e4#.fhletud7a” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Hacker Noon[/button]
