Back in 2014, Google responded to the growing interest in virtual reality by launching the Cardboard virtual reality platform and shipped millions of viewers. Cardboard is no longer actively developed, but Google has done the next best thing this week by deciding to turn it into an open source project.
Cardboard consists of everything required to enjoy virtual reality experiences including a cheap cardboard viewer your smartphone sits inside. Google also provided a software development kit for developers to help them create Cardboard-compatible experiences for iOS and Android.
Posting on the Google Developers blog, Jeffrey Chen, product manager for AR and VR, explains that usage of the Cardboard platform has declined over time, but it's still consistently used for entertainment and education purposes. With that in mind, "we think that an open source model—with additional contributions from us—is the best way for developers to continue to build experiences for Cardboard."
Google has now released the libraries required to build Cardboard apps for both its own Android platform and Apple's iOS. Those libraries include the APIs necessary for head tracking, input handling, and lens distortion. An Android QR code library is also being released to make it easy to pair apps with any Cardboard viewer. That's important because Google previously launched the Cardboard Manufacturer Kit as an open source project allowing other manufacturers to create their own VR viewers.
Google isn't abandoning Cardboard completely and promises to continue contributing to the open source project. As versions of Android and iOS continue being developed and released the Cardboard libraries will surely need tweaking to maintain compatibility, which is likely where Google's focus will remain.