After five years and 15 million units produced, Google has decided the time has come to fold the Cardboard project. Both the cheap cardboard VR headset, which introduced million of user to their first VR experience through YouTube VR videos and the Expeditions software, and the Cardboard development kit will now live on as a free and open source project. It means that the larger open source community will be able to contribute to the publicly accessible product. 
While this is good news, it’s hard not to read it as the nail in the coffin of smartphone-based VR, especially because the announcement comes just week after Google discontinued the Daydream smarpthone-VR headset and the related VR platform of the same name. John Carmack, CTO of the competing VR firm Oculus, last month commented in a similar fashion in regard to Gear VR, the headset its company developed in partnership with Samsung, saying that the product’s days “were numbered”. According to Carmack, smartphone-based VR headsets never got the experience right. “If you have to pop your phone out of your phone case and dock it in a headset”, he said, “you will use it twice.”