It would be a nice use of "old" phones as well. Load up some old phones with Virtual Virtual Reality and other games.

Yeah I think it was a huge missed opportunity. The idea was great, the barrier to entry was really low, and it worked really well for stuff like street view / google earth.

I showed it to my daughter the other day and she was really impressed. There's only one remaining app that can use it afaik.

Handset hardware and ML/CV software has improved in the decade since Google Cardboard came out. 6DoF is definitely possible.

The Sketchfab viewer still supports Cardboard: https://sketchfab.com/models/45f5e56887f44075bbf283977c99541...

AFAICT there are zero for Daydream. I have an old Daydream headset. It's been useless for... 2 years now? 3?

It was extraordinary for watching movies. except the fact that the phone would be burning hot after 10 minutes.

Google Daydream is dead, no longer supported by modern phones, the store no longer works and they removed all Daydream specific features from their own apps. Getting a Lenovo Mirage Solo to work is possible, but requires a lot of workarounds, side loading and software downgrades.

The older Google Cardboard on the other side got open sourced and is still somewhat alive, works on modern phones and even the Youtube app still has support for it. It is however not getting any attention from developers, since everybody that cares about VR has long moved on to Quest or given up on VR. Cardboard due to not having controller and limited to 3DOF was a dead end.