Cardboard SDK

Copyright 2019 Google LLC

This SDK provides everything you need to create your own Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for Google Cardboard. It supports essential VR features, such as:

• Motion tracking
• Stereoscopic rendering
• User interaction via the viewer button

With these capabilities you can build entirely new VR experiences, or enhance existing apps with VR capabilities.

Get started

To get started with the Cardboard SDK, see:

• Quickstart for Android NDK
• Quickstart for iOS

API reference

• Cardboard SDK API Reference for Android NDK and iOS

Release notes

The SDK release notes are available on the releases page.

Roadmap

The project roadmap is available on the Projects page.

How to make contributions

Please read and follow the steps in CONTRIBUTING.md file.

License

Please see the LICENSE file.

Data Collection

The libraries cardboard and cardboard-xr-plugin do not collect any data. However, when a QR code is recognized during scanning as requested by the developer, these libraries may make multiple web requests to retrieve the Cardboard viewer device parameters.

Specifically:

• If the decoded URL matches “https://google.com/cardboard” or “https://google.com/cardboard/cfg?p=...”, it is parsed to retrieve the Cardboard viewer device parameters.
• Otherwise, the decoded URL is requested via a normal web request. Any HTTP redirects are followed until a matching URL is found.

See QrCodeContentProcessor.java (Android) and device_params_helper.mm (iOS) for the code that does the above.

Brand guidelines

The “Google Cardboard” name is a trademark owned by Google and is not included within the assets licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Cardboard is a free and open-source SDK that developers can use to create apps that are compatible with the Google Cardboard VR platform. At the same time, it‘s important to make sure that people don’t use the “Google Cardboard” mark in ways that could create confusion.

The guidelines below are designed to clarify the permitted uses of the “Google Cardboard” mark.

Things you can do:

• Use the “Google Cardboard” mark to describe or refer to apps developed with the Cardboard SDK in ways that would be considered “fair use.”
• Use the “Google Cardboard” mark to make truthful factual statements regarding the compatibility or interoperability of your app. For example, “This app is compatible with Google Cardboard” or “This app works with Google Cardboard.”

Things you can't do:

• Don‘t use the “Google Cardboard” mark in a manner that implies that Google has endorsed or authorized your app or that makes your app appear to be an official Google product. For example, you shouldn’t reference your product as “an official Google Cardboard app.”
• Don't incorporate the “Google Cardboard” mark into your own product names, service names, trademarks, logos, or company names.
• Don't display the “Google Cardboard” mark in a manner that is misleading, unfair, defamatory, infringing, libelous, disparaging, obscene or otherwise objectionable to Google.
• Don‘t alter or distort the “Google Cardboard” mark. This includes modifying the mark through hyphenation, combination or abbreviation. For example, don’t say “G Cardboard” or “Google-Cardboard.”

In addition to these guidelines, please ensure that you follow the trademark usage guidelines available here: https://www.google.com/permissions/logos-trademarks/.

Manufacturers

The Cardboard viewer specification is open source and ready for you to start building.