What Can You do with a Piece of Cardboard

... and a few other bits and pieces. For about 25 bucks you can turn a smartphone into a virtual reality device. About a year ago, not long after Google have them away at their annual I/O coherence I bought a Cardboard. That's right, in this context cardboard is a proper noun. It's a thing, a really cool thing. When i got mine it was just a toy. It could interact with YouTube and there was a cool little demo, but not much else. Here is a taste of what you can do with it:
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/07/23/google-expeditions-class-599/
How do you get one? In the past few months a few companies have given them away, but if you're not the type to wait around for the next freebie you can do a quick search for "cardboard vr"or "Google cardboard". For $25 bucks you should be able to get a ready to assemble kit with am NFC, near field communication, tag. How does it work? Does it really matter? It's cool, like bow tie cool, but if you really must know: http://www.imcardboard.com/faq
Be warned, not all phones have all their hardware set up in exactly the right way so that everything works just so. On my Galaxy Nexus I often had to flick the washer shaped switch several times before the phone got what I wanted it to do, but still it's fun. With more and more apps being built for Cardboard it is becoming a really useful little gadget.