I bought a 9-yuan VR headset.

I bought a Cardboard a while back, but that was the first generation. And the first gen had plenty of rough edges—it didn’t fit big phones (even though my phone at the time was still a Sony Z1), and there were hardly any apps (aside from a few demos there was basically nothing to play). Then recently I stumbled on the fact that YouTube now has a proper 360° VR video channel, and that’s when it hit me: the second-gen version of that box from Google I/O was already dirt cheap on Taobao.

Cardboard is a little freebie Google handed out at its developer conference. With a handful of demo apps it gives you a fairly basic virtual reality experience — basic, but supposedly mind-blowing. Supposedly. I saw people’s reactions on various forums, and the crowd was unanimous: it blew their faces off, it was the shit, it was unbelievably awesome. So of course I got curious… no, really, curious. So I picked one up. Mine was 20 yuan on Taobao. You can also download the PDF template and DIY one out of cardboard yourself — the box is cheap, the convex lenses are the annoying part to find. When it arrived, the knockoff level turned out to be pretty high. Apart from the missing NFC, everything it should have is there.