I don't have a cardboard to properly see if the image really is "3D", but it seems like it's just a photosphere and therefore doesn't really have depth information. Is that right?
But yes, we had it. We had VR helmets, too. Consumer-grade. Remember the VFX-1? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear)
But this time, VR is going to be different. Honest.
Sometime in the future, consumers will have software that can turn 2D images into simulated 3D [0]. It's still in dev mode right now, though.
The thing that's most intriguing to me are the experiments using multiple depth cameras set up around a space and using software to build a live, 3d model and overlay the video data as a texture on top of the models. It's all very rudimentary and low-res at the moment but it's the sort of thing that can eventually become 3d/VR telepresence and that just strikes me as awesome.
One thing is that it seems to me that anything that's recorded by a camera (rather than rendered in realtime) is going to be "wrong" once you tilt your head, as your eyes are now on top of each other rather than next to each other.
Sounds like a good open hardware/software project but I'm short on cameras and mics for something like that. Anyone see potential there?
Combine with laser rangers and filters for their wavelength on the cams, and you can sample 3d point cloud data too and render the environment as a 3D (4D) scene, use it for composite reference, or slap a small LiDAR scanner under the whole thing for precise measurement.