Virtual Reality

I've been fascinated by VR since I was a kid, but only recently got to experiment with it. I've built several Google Cardboard type VR rigs using a smart phone, and It's a fun platform. The software is a bit limited by the horsepower on a cell phone but there are some pretty neat games and demos for it.

What I have really wanted to try to an Oculus Rift, which is run off of a PC and lets you play PC games and demos in VR. A friend of mine was nice enought o loan me one recently and it is amazing. It's a first gen prototype, the Developer Kit 1 or DK1, and it's pretty awesome but has some issues. First issue is that the resolution is pretty low, you can see each individual pixel and text is mostly unreadable. The other issue is that the head tracking tends to drift over time and needs to be reset regularly to look forward. Both of these issues have been addressed in the new Oculus devkit DK2 with a higher res screen and a new head tracking system.

I'm working on building my own knockoff of the Oculus, parts to arrive soon. Mine should have head tracking similar to the DK1, but a screen closer to the DK2, so it'll be a sort of dev kit 1.5