Large technology companies often abandon projects that they tried to pull off but did not have the expected success. Many say goodbye not to come back, but there is a way to try to give them a second chance: open those projects to the public and turn them into Open Source projects.

That is just what Google has just done with its Cardboard project, the cardboard virtual reality glasses that brought these experiences to millions of users in a cheap and simple way and that would then give rise to its newly abandoned Daydream View VR platform. Great news for a project that at least has the opportunity for the user community to collect the witness and take that unique virtual reality to the next level.

Cardboard has a second chance

Google has long shared the technical specifications to replicate the design of the cardboard glasses that it launched to the market by surprise during the Google I / O 2014 event.

Now the company has decided to go further and publish the project code, the so-called Cardboard SDK, on GitHub. With this movement they hope that the developer community will “continue to develop experiences for Cardboard and add support to their applications”.

The company, however, does not completely depart from the project, and in that announcement, they indicate that they will continue to make their own contributions, and in fact, they talk about the release of new features like an SDK package to be able to work with Unity and these unique VR Glasses.

Definitely a successful move to try to offer this project a second chance. They had already done it with other projects like Google Wave – now turned into Apache Wave – but I’m sure many thinks (as a server) that it would have been fantastic if they had done the same with Reader, that fantastic RSS reader that Google closed overnight.

More information | Google