Cardboctober, ten years on

It has been 10 years since I ran Cardboctober, a month-long hackathon in which I created something new for Google Cardboard each day and wrote about it. I considered doing it again this year, but my time is spread thinner these days than it was in 2016, so I thought I’d do a bit of a retrospective on the WebVR and Google Cardboard scene instead. It started with a hack day Cardboctober didn’t come out of nowhere. In July 2016, I had run Game Dev Day for JSOxford, a hack day at the Story Museum in Oxford for making games and VR in web tech, as part of Summer of Hacks. I gave the intro to A-Frame, and people left with things like an immersive VR art gallery and a maze of weeping angels that freeze when you look at them. Cardboctober was the follow-on, only with a month to fill instead of a day. The stack underneath Cardboctober ran on WebVR, or really on Three.js and a pile of polyfills. In my post-mortem talk I boiled the whole setup down to a spinning cube in Three.js with the stereo…