Last month Google announced that it will shut down the production of its Daydream Virtual Reality headsets. Google said they did not get the response they hoped from pubic. According to Google People did not want to leave their mobile phones while using the headset. Neither people nor the developers were interested in adapting to new technology. But in the recent news google announced that they are open sourcing Cardboard for Developers.
Google may have stopped working on daydream and cardboard, but they definitely do not want to waste the SDK of cardboard. Google wrote in their official blog “Today, we’re releasing the Cardboard open source project to let the developer community continue to build Cardboard experiences and add support to their apps for an ever-increasing diversity of smartphone screen resolutions and configurations.” You can read the full blog here.
Google is releasing libraries for developers to create VR apps for Android and IOS. The open-source project will have head tracking API, lens distortion, Input handling a QR scanner so that the developers can create apps based on VR headsets.
This is not the first time when Google has open-sourced its VR components. Google launched the Cardboard headsets 5 years ago with some giveaways. Millions of people got the Headsets, but due to lack of developing and innovation people lost interest in it. So Google open-sourced the hardware of Google cardboard in hope of some innovation. Developers were excited with the open-sourcing a gave good response to Google. Google is hoping for the same response for its SDK open sourcing.