If you open Baidu Cardboard in 2022, you will find that it has been occupied by ads and spam, and in the midst of a desolation, a post published in 2017 wrote sadly: The Google Carton era has passed, and the first year of VR 2016 has passed.
Now, in the clamor of the concept of the metaverse, looking back at how this pre-VR product was born, how it gradually died out, and what role it played in the entire history of VR development, may make us think more about the entire industry.
Back on May 19, 2014, Google unveiled Google Cardboard at the I/O Developers Conference, a simple headset made up of lenses, magnets, devil felts, and rubber bands that allow people to experience VR content at a very low cost.
Two months later, Meta (formerly Facebook) acquired VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion. The following year, the entire VR industry ushered in a big explosion, Microsoft released the MR headset Hololens in January, HTC and Valve jointly developed the HTC Vive in March,
Google Cardboard is like a butterfly that set off a storm, so that the entire technology circle ignited a passion for VR, but Google itself began to be a little uncertain, until 2016 officially launched the second generation of mobile phone VR headset Daydream View, but at that time the entire VR industry has begun to move towards the winter, up early Google rushed a late set.
Today, Meta's Oculus Quest 2 has sold nearly 10 million, accounting for three-quarters of the world's market share, and Sony, Pico, and HTC behind it are waiting for opportunities, but they do not see the former pathfinder Google. Looking back, what is left for Google's VR engineers may only be a sigh.
1. What is Cardboard?
Before 2014, VR technology was still relatively unpopular, there were almost no mature hardware products on the market, but smart phones were in a stage of rapid development, so two engineers at Google built Google Cardboard with a convenient and easy-to-use idea based on a smart phone.
Obviously, this is Google's test of the waters in the VR field, Google engineers David Coz and Damien Henry in just 6 months to design the product.
The entire device is a combination of lenses, magnets, devil felts and rubber bands, embedded in the smartphone and opened the relevant app, the user can watch VR videos and games. Because the production materials are simple and easy to obtain, Google officials even provide free parts lists, schematic diagrams and assembly instructions on its website, encouraging people to assemble themselves with easily accessible parts.
The production cost is very low, allowing anyone to make their own VR headset according to google's public drawings, which is very helpful for the popularization of VR technology. At the beginning of 2016, Cardboard achieved sales of 5 million, and by 2017, Google had sold a total of 10 million sets of Google Cardboard, and related applications had been downloaded a total of 160 million times.
Of course, cardboard's shortcomings are also very obvious, low production costs correspond to rudimentary hardware, many users said that after playing for less than 5 minutes, they will start to be dizzy, and need to rest for a while to continue playing.
Therefore, there was a voice in the industry at that time: the real VR may not be what Google Cardboard looks like.
2. Google's pioneering and lost
It was originally a game that Google inadvertently inserted willows, but it caused a surprising market reaction, many technology giants saw opportunities in it, and Google itself gradually lost in it.
At the same time that Google launched Cardboard, Oculus, HTC, Sony and other companies are deeply cultivating the full-featured VR headset, and when Google launched the second generation of embedded VR headset DayDream View in 2016, HTC's VR all-in-one HTC Vive has been on the market for more than a year, Oculus's consumer-grade PC VR headset Oculus Rift has just been released, and Sony's PlayStation VR is also on the market.
In 2016, known as the first year of VR, almost all giant companies are moving in the direction of PC VR and all-in-one VR, only Google is still immersed in the illusion of mobile embedded VR headsets, for which Google even supported the mobile VR platform Daydream to enhance the user experience, and the story was buried.
From 2017 to 2018, with the arrival of PC VR and VR all-in-one machines, mobile VR sales represented by DayDream View fell sharply. According to Super Data data, Google's Daydream View sales in 2016 were 260,000 units, which has dropped to 150,000 units in 2017, with PS VR sales of 1.69 million units and Oculus Rift sales of 320,000 units in the same period.
By 2019, Google directly said that its latest flagship phone, the Pixel 4 series, no longer supports its own Daydream mobile VR platform. The Daydream Viewer headset has also begun to stop selling, and the exploration of mobile VR Daydream has officially come to an end.
For such a dismal ending, Du Hongchao, founder of Yuantuo and AN veteran, commented: Most of the time Google is a great company because it rejects mediocre products. Unfortunately, the core reason why Google Box ended up almost in vain was precisely the cost logic of succumbing to mediocrity.
3. Tears of the times
Choice is more important than effort, and most of the time, that same applies to tech giants like Google.
Looking back at Google's VR road, first through the cheap, simple Cardboard to popularize VR products, the initial popularization of users, and then around the smart phone to build an application ecology, and then the hardware and platform iterative upgrades, each step has a rule, a board and an eye, but in the direction of self-contained, did not extend to the direction of a more professional all-in-one machine.
Shi Jun, deputy secretary-general of the Chengdu Virtual and Augmented Reality Industry Association, believes that the advantage of Cardboard is that the experience is convenient to get started quickly, easy to carry, and it is also the manual work that many schools have done. The disadvantage is that it relies on the performance of the phone, the resolution is low, and the rapid moving scene is dizzy. But this paper shell, which has created some chinese businesses with mobile phones as the carrier shell, made a lot of money in 2016, after all, the cost was less than 20 yuan sold to more than 300 yuan on the C-end.
In the industry's view, even in the industry environment of 2014, Cardboard is also a very rough VR product, which can bring users a very limited experience, and Google has a path dependence on such a primary product, resulting in its short-sightedness and cognitive dislocation in the direction of VR technology, laying the groundwork for it to fall behind in the future high-level industry competition.
Founder of Hashiqi and | of Metaverse AR Shen Haoran, president of the VR Association, said: Google's glasses box, as a representative of early VR glasses, makes people have a feeling that they can't love. Folded in a cardboard box, with two small convex lenses, it looks slightly rough and cheap, and the actual experience is almost the lower limit of the VR glasses box at that time.
Cardboard's development engineer David Coz once said that Cardboard is a project that arrives at the right time.
At that time, 2016, known as the first year of VR, has not yet arrived, and there are still 4 years to go before the release of Quest 2, which established the status of the Meta industry, and the meta-universe has not yet become a topic in the streets, and the arrival of Cardboard is like a seed drifting with the wind in the spring, which has its irreplaceable historical significance and industry role. Even today, its hundred-dollar, people-friendly price has helped many users experience VR for the first time.
Now, 8 years after the release of Cardboard, the Google Carton era has become a distant past, and the entire industry is becoming more mature and complex, and hardware, software, content and industry standards have made unprecedented developments. We believe that there will still be revolutionary VR products coming at the right time in the future, and they will collectively form part of the human technological process.