Google Cardboard

Virtual reality from a folded box and a phone, ten million viewers, then quietly shelved

Shut down
19902026

Google Cardboard was a fold-it-yourself virtual reality viewer, a cardboard box with two lenses that held a smartphone, handed out at Google I/O on 25 June 2014 as a side project by two Paris engineers. It became the most distributed VR device ever, over ten million viewers shipped by 2017 plus millions of branded copies from newspapers and carmakers, and the base of Google's VR ambitions until Daydream. Google open-sourced it in November 2019 and stopped selling it in March 2021.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2014
  2. 25 June 2014 Launch
    Handed out at Google I/O

    A folded box and two lenses; a $2 billion joke at Oculus's expense.

  3. 2015
  4. 28 May 2015 Feature
    Expeditions and iOS

    Cardboard reaches classrooms and iPhones.

  5. 7 November 2015 Feature
    The New York Times sends a million

    NYT VR launches with Cardboard viewers in the Sunday paper.

  6. 2016
  7. 27 January 2016 Peak
    Five million shipped

    Ten million by February 2017, plus 160 million app downloads.

  8. 18 May 2016 Feature
    Daydream is announced

    Cardboard becomes the low end of Google's VR plan.

  9. 2019
  10. 6 November 2019 Shutdown announced
    Open-sourced

    Google says it is no longer actively developing Cardboard.

  11. 2021
  12. 3 March 2021 Shutdown
    Removed from the Google Store

    The official viewer is no longer sold.

The site through time

Browse arvr.google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2014–2021 Founded A 20 percent project from Google's Paris office, then the base of Google VR

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: On 6 November 2019 Google said it was no longer actively developing the Cardboard software and released it as open source, three weeks after discontinuing Daydream, its more ambitious phone-VR platform. The Google Store stopped selling the official Cardboard viewer on 3 March 2021. Google had moved out of consumer virtual reality altogether.

Our analysis: Cardboard was the cheapest way anyone has ever tried virtual reality, and that was both its genius and its ceiling: a $15 box that gave a hundred million people a two-minute demo and almost nobody a habit. Once phone VR itself stopped being a direction Google believed in, there was nothing left to sell, so it handed the code to the community and left.

History [edit]

A box at I/O

At the end of Google I/O on 25 June 2014, every attendee received a flat piece of cardboard. Folded up, with a pair of plastic lenses and a magnet, it held an Android phone in front of your eyes and, with the right app, turned it into a stereoscopic virtual reality headset. It had been built as a 20 percent project by two engineers at Google's Paris cultural institute, David Coz and Damien Henry, and it was a joke at Facebook's expense, which had paid $2 billion for Oculus that March. The joke worked. The Cardboard app, Street View in VR, and a specification anyone could manufacture spread the design faster than any headset before it.

By January 2016 Google had shipped five million viewers, and by February 2017 ten million, alongside 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps. Newspapers gave them away with weekend editions, the New York Times sent a million to subscribers for its NYT VR launch, Volvo and Coca-Cola printed their own, and Google's Expeditions programme took classrooms on virtual field trips. There was a Star Wars edition. For a couple of years, if a normal person had tried VR, this was how.

Daydream and after

Cardboard was always meant to be a gateway. In May 2016 Google announced Daydream, a proper phone-VR platform with a soft headset and a controller, and Cardboard became the low end of a strategy. When Daydream failed to catch on and was discontinued in October 2019, the strategy went with it. On 6 November 2019 Google announced it was open-sourcing the Cardboard SDK, saying it was "not actively developing" the platform, and thanking the community. The Google Store quietly removed the official viewer on 3 March 2021.

The design lives on in the millions of viewers still in drawers, in the open-source project, and in the fact that a whole generation's first VR memory smells faintly of corrugated card.

The domain today

arvr.google.com/cardboard/ has been redirected to the open-source project's documentation; Google's VR pages now cover its Android XR work instead.

Similar projects

Zune Microsoft's answer to the iPod, five years late 2006–2015 iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket 2001–2022 HP TouchPad Killed 49 days after launch 2011–2011 Google Glass The face computer the public rejected 2013–2023 Microsoft Kin Dead in 48 days 2010–2011 Pebble The smartwatch Kickstarter built, and Fitbit buried 2013–2018

Sources [edit]

  1. Google Cardboard is getting bigger, better, and iOS-friendly The Verge 28 May 2015 [archived]
  2. Google has shipped 5 million Cardboard headsets The Verge 27 January 2016 [archived]
  3. Open sourcing Google Cardboard Google Developers Blog 6 November 2019 [archived]
  4. Google is open-sourcing Cardboard as it winds down phone-based VR The Verge 6 November 2019 [archived]
  5. Google Store stops selling Cardboard VR headsets 9to5Google 3 March 2021 [archived]

Last verified: 15 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).