{"id":909545,"date":"2026-11-07T22:36:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T22:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/909545\/"},"modified":"2026-11-07T22:36:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T22:36:11","slug":"reviving-google-cardboard-without-google-or-cardboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/909545\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviving Google Cardboard, Without Google Or Cardboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember Google Cardboard? The late, unlamented practice of strapping a phone to your face so you could get motion sickness in a virtual environment? [brenpoly] wants you to reconsider, because in the years since Google pulled the plug on mobile VR, phones have gotten really, really good and he\u2019s got a project called CardboardXR on GitHub<\/a> that the project video<\/a> enbedded below bills as \u201cA 5$ Apple Vision Pro\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s 5$ if you already happen to have a flagship phone like the Pixel 9 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro he\u2019s using for testing\u2013 otherwise you\u2019d be out a rather larger chunk of change in order to pick up such a pocket supercomputer. In any case, he\u2019s able to get 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) tracking from these units, along with using the cameras for passthrough and object detection, hand tracking, and gesture control\u2013 everything the big boys net you, in other words. That\u2019s pretty impressive compared to the 3DOF, and zero tracking or pass-through mobile VR used to get you.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also built adjustable optics into his 3D-printed replacement for Google\u2019s old face-hugging cardboard, which you can get on Makerworld<\/a>.\u00a0 On the other hand, presumably you could just cut a hole for the camera bumps in one of those if you\u2019re the kind of person who throws nothing out. Either way you\u2019d be using the same lenses; it turns out they\u2019re still available online, so that\u2019s what [brenpoly] spec\u2019d.<\/p>\n

All these fancy features aren\u2019t entirely [brenpoly]\u2019s own work: his software is based on Unity which has some slick VR\/AR tools and the ability to build in all the relevant machine learning models for things like hand tracking. He\u2019s also taking some major inspiration from the Google Cardboard SDK, which Google open-sourced back around the time they gave up on it<\/a>. It\u2019s still a very impressive project regardless of the toolchain involved, though there\u2019s a certain irony that [brenpoly] is now strapping a phone to his face after his last project we featured<\/a>\u00a0 was all about getting him to put it down.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remember Google Cardboard? The late, unlamented practice of strapping a phone to your face so you could get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":909546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[74,179,509,180],"class_list":["post-909545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}