Cardboard Camera

Cardboard Camera is an app straight from Google that turned Cardboard into a tool for creating your own VR content rather than just consuming it, setting it apart from the vast majority of other titles on the platform focused purely on entertainment. The user slowly rotates their phone around its own axis while the app stitches together a panoramic photosphere complemented by spatial audio recorded during the capture, producing a simple but functional 3D record of a specific place and moment.

The resulting images can be viewed directly in the headset with a parallax effect that gives the static photo a sense of depth, and can be shared further as VR photos compatible with other viewers supporting the photosphere format, including the viewer built into Google Photos. Technically, this was a clever use of an ordinary phone camera and gyroscope, without needing specialized hardware, which fit well with Cardboard's philosophy of being the cheapest and most accessible entry point into virtual reality.

Cardboard Camera wasn't a game, but it was one of the most frequently mentioned apps on the entire platform because it demonstrated a practical use of VR beyond entertainment, specifically as an alternative to family photo albums or a way to record travel and memories. At the same time, it ran into the limits of mobile VR photography, such as the lower resolution of the resulting sphere, sensitivity to hand movement during capture, and difficulty capturing moving objects. It is still remembered today as one of the most accessible ways to create your own memory viewable in stereoscopic space. Unlike most other apps on the platform, Cardboard Camera didn't require understanding any game rules or controls; all you had to do was turn the phone around its own axis, which made it understandable even to people who otherwise never considered gaming or virtual reality at all and only tried a headset once while visiting friends.

Why play: For anyone who wants to simply capture a memory in stereoscopic space without needing to learn any game rules or controls.