Open sourcing Google Cardboard

Google has announced the open sourcing of its Google Cardboard project, initially launched five years ago as an affordable and simple virtual reality (VR) viewer that has reached over 15 million users worldwide. While the usage of Cardboard has declined and Google is no longer actively developing the Google VR SDK, Cardboard remains popular for educational and entertainment VR experiences, such as YouTube and Expeditions. By open sourcing the project, Google aims to allow developers to continue enhancing and expanding Cardboard's capabilities, offering libraries for building VR apps on iOS and Android, as well as APIs for head tracking, lens distortion rendering, and input handling. The open source initiative also includes an Android QR code library to support a variety of smartphone configurations and Cardboard viewers. Google will continue to support the project with contributions like a new SDK package for Unity, encouraging the developer community to innovate further using the Cardboard platform.