Cardboard Design Lab

Cardboard Design Lab was created by Google as an interactive demo and, at the same time, a guide for developers and ordinary users alike who wanted to try out what kind of interactions mobile virtual reality even allows and where its natural limits lie. The app offered a series of short scenes in which the player could try operating an elevator, controlling a tentacle, riding a swing, moving across platforms, or interacting with a virtual panel, each scene serving as a standalone demonstration of a different gameplay mechanism.

The goal wasn't to offer a continuous story or challenge but rather a catalog of possibilities that developers could use as inspiration when designing their own Cardboard apps, accompanied by brief commentary explaining the advantages and pitfalls of each approach, for instance why it's advisable to avoid fast virtual movement without corresponding physical movement of the body, in order to prevent motion sickness. Technically, the app was undemanding, since the individual scenes were minimalist and served a purely demonstrative purpose rather than being a full-fledged experience.

In the history of Cardboard, Design Lab holds a special place as one of the few apps aimed more at creators than end players, and many later Cardboard games unknowingly repeated exactly the patterns that this app was the first to systematically demonstrate and name. Today it stands as an interesting historical document of the early phase of mobile VR, when the entire field was still working out what was safe from a design standpoint and what already caused players motion sickness or a loss of spatial orientation. For many people, it was also their very first opportunity to get their hands on virtual reality for free, without having to buy a specific game, since the app was freely downloadable and all it required was the Cardboard itself and a phone they already had at home. Translating this idea into concrete, tangible scenes, such as riding an elevator or manipulating a virtual tentacle, proved to be a smart move, because it let both developers and casual onlookers quickly form their own idea of what was actually technically feasible on the given platform and what wasn't.

Why play: For anyone interested in the history of VR design, and for anyone who wanted to try, for free and without buying a game, how virtual reality actually works for the first time.