Building on the success of its Cardboard VR kit for smartphones, Google announced today at its I/O conference version 2. It's still just a paper holder for a smartphone, but the new Cardboard works with bigger phones—up to 6-inch screens—has a more reliable button that will work with any phone, and now requires just three assembly steps instead of 12.

Cardboard is no longer just for Android, either; the company also announced that the Cardboard SDK for creating VR apps would be made available for iOS, and you'll be able to use your iPhone as a VR headset, too.

Google also launched a similar low-tech/self-build solution for creating VR videos, called Jump. There are three parts: a rig for capturing 3D video, software for combining multiple videos into a single VR world, and a player to actually use the video.

The design for the 360-degree, 16-camera array used to capture stereoscopic VR videos can be built from 3D printed plastic, metal, or even, yes, cardboard. Third parties can use the basic design for their own products, which Google showed with a GoPro-produced rig during the keynote.

The software assembler will combine the video from all the cameras, automatically taking care of differences in exposure, alignment, and so on. Playback will use YouTube. YouTube already supports 2D 360-degree videos, though they're rare. When watching these videos, the camera can be rotated by the viewer to change where exactly it looks. Later in the year this will be extended to support 3D playback on VR devices.

Google also has a new educational tool using VR, called Expeditions. With Expeditions, teachers can take their classes on virtual field trips. The students have Cardboard for VR, and the teacher has a tablet used to control the trip. The headsets are all synchronized to the tablet, so the teacher can control where in the world the students are and what they're looking at; the students are then free to look around using VR.