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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’s got a project called CardboardXR on GitHub that the project video enbedded below bills as “A 5$ Apple Vision Pro”
Well, it’s 5$ if you already happen to have a flagship phone like the Pixel 9 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro he’s using for testing– otherwise you’d be out a rather larger chunk of change in order to pick up such a pocket supercomputer. In any case, he’s 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– everything the big boys net you, in other words. That’s pretty impressive compared to the 3DOF, and zero tracking or pass-through mobile VR used to get you.
He’s also built adjustable optics into his 3D-printed replacement for Google’s old face-hugging cardboard, which you can get on Makerworld. On the other hand, presumably you could just cut a hole for the camera bumps in one of those if you’re the kind of person who throws nothing out. Either way you’d be using the same lenses; it turns out they’re still available online, so that’s what [brenpoly] spec’d.
All these fancy features aren’t entirely [brenpoly]’s 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’s also taking some major inspiration from the Google Cardboard SDK, which Google open-sourced back around the time they gave up on it. It’s still a very impressive project regardless of the toolchain involved, though there’s a certain irony that [brenpoly] is now strapping a phone to his face after his last project we featured was all about getting him to put it down.
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