CardboardXR is a 3D-printed, phone-based XR headset built by [brenpoly] that delivers 6 Degrees of Freedom tracking, camera passthrough, object detection, hand tracking, and gesture control for roughly $5 in parts. The target hardware is a Pixel 9 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro. The lenses are original Google Cardboard spec, still purchasable online. The housing is on Makerworld with adjustable optics built in.
This matters because modern flagship phones are categorically different machines from the hardware Google Cardboard died with. The original platform offered 3DOF and no passthrough. CardboardXR closes that gap using Unity's VR/AR toolchain and ML models for hand tracking, plus the open-sourced Google Cardboard SDK that Google released around the time they abandoned the platform. The gap between this and a $3,500 Apple Vision Pro is narrowing in ways that are uncomfortable for the headset industry.
The full GitHub repo and project video are worth your time not for the conclusion but for the implementation details: how [brenpoly] wires Unity's ML pipelines to the phone's camera stack, how adjustable optics are integrated into the printed frame, and where the remaining friction points are. Mobile XR was declared dead. The hardware quietly got good enough to reopen the question.
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