[asimovfan]

Cardboard was great, and except a lack of software there were no problems about it in my opinion. I remember playing flight simulator on google earth and thinking how much potential this had. I have a meta quest 2 now and it is still not clear to me whether it is really that much better than cardboard.

[ben_w]

I think the lack of software that really took advantage of the possibilities and cared about the limitations — that wasn't simply a normal smartphone app with a bad UX because the display was now on your face — is the main reason Cardboard disappeared.

It's like: imagine if you just run the original DOOM in DOSBox on a phone and try to play it with the on-screen keyboard — that will obviously suck. Less obviously, even something as simple as going from a NES controller to an XBox controller can radically change experiences. You have to really consider what the right way is to use a system, and instead of doing that a lot of companies clearly go for existing zeitgeist in design language. (From memory as I heard it well before GenAI, real UX experts react to such UI designs in much the same way that artists react to Stable Diffusion).

Same goes for most VR stuff: There's some good games, but selling it as that means headsets have to be priced as consoles. That excludes the Android XR, and absolutely excludes the Apple Vision Pro.