DIY VR Goggles V2
I've been pretty busy on projects, and wanted to share my recently updated VR goggles. A few people have asked about how to build them so I figured I'd write a bit about that too.
It has the same stats as the last version. Reads as an Oculus DK1, has 1080p resolution. I scratch built the whole case from styrene sheet plastic, it's a bit heavier now but it's a lot more sturdy and easy to handle. The cardboard version was lighter, but every time I handled it I was afraid of snagging one of the exposed wires on something or shorting a circuit board.I think I just figured out how to mitigate some of the weight, so I guess there's a version 3 in the works. If I move the circuit boards around to the sides of the rig it shifts the center of gravity a bit and makes it all less front heavy.
It's pretty easy to make these now. The two components you need to get started are a Rift compatible LCD and a head tracking board.
You can usually find a Rift compatible LCD on Ebay. The one's I've seen are either 1200x800 or 1080p. The 1080p screens are bigger and heavier (7" diagonal) but you get a lot more resolution. The screen requires a hardware hack to be read as a Rift screen, but the nice people of China do it for you.
As for a head tracker, that's also been made available on Ebay by Chinese tech importers. There are two readily available varieties. The larger board with the fancy lights is an STM32fDiscovery. It's a prototyping microcontroller with several built in sensors. They pre-flash it with the last build of Foculus, which is out of date but will work for some things as a DK1. The other board is a straight copy of the DK1 board flashed with the actual open source code from Oculus. I haven't had a chance to try it but it should be compatible the the latest DK1 software.
Once you have these it's just a matter of building a headset. Get a cheap set of VR cell phone goggles and tape all this crap to the front of it. I didn't have to write any code or solder anything. I just combined readily available components from China.