Tearing down a relatively simple AR beacon was the final step (after the headset and the lightsaber) of dismantling Lenovo's disappointing Star Wars: Jedi Challenges game for disposal. Since I was still in a teardown mood, I decided to continue dismantling my collection of phone-based headsets. I have quite a collection and, in hindsight, they've all been money wasted. Those devices could only react to motion in three degrees of freedom and never approached the immersion of real VR headsets that can track six degrees of freedom. I packed them away after getting my first 6DoF headset, thinking I might find a way to do something creative with the phone-based headsets.

I never got around to devising interesting projects with Google Cardboard (and derivatives) and it's not going to get any easier in the future. Google officially killed Cardboard in 2021, but by then it was merely a formality. Derivatives (and wannabe successors) like Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream were abandoned even earlier. With official support discontinued, software support for any potential project ideas also faded away. The first-party SDKs have either gone stale or have disappeared. Third-party support is no better, being removed from tools like Unity and Unreal. And finally, infrastructure support like Samsung Gear VR Store and Google Daydream app have been taken offline. If I want to write code for Google Cardboard/Daydream/Gear VR I would almost have to work on my own scratch, like another long-past-its-prime hardware platform Windows Phone. But this would actually be even more difficult, because I don't know how to work with these lenses in software in terms of 3D rendering projection math.

Therefore, using them as VR headsets would require more effort than I'm likely to spend. Keeping them intact as VR headsets consume a lot of space with no good payoff I can foresee. Looking at this very simple design, the only reuse possibility I can imagine are those lenses in a non-VR application. At the very least, a bag of salvaged lenses would occupy less space than a bag of obsolete and abandoned VR headsets. With this line of thinking, my phone-based VR headset purge begins. First on the workbench: Google Daydream VR Headset.