How-To, Teardowns and Tutorials
Oculus DK2 Lens – Characteristics
The Oculus DK2 is a remarkable VR headset, producing a remarkably wide field of view with very inexpensive single element optics. VRtifacts was curious about the characteristics of the Oculus DK2 lens: what size, what material, and what focal length? The lenses...
W-Industries Unscripted
W-Industries (Virtuality) always seemed to have a PR person riding herd on any video material that was released about the company or products. Everything the public saw was tightly scripted and edited. But... here's a 1992 video from...
Vintage VR-4 Head Mounted Display Teardown
Here's a much more detailed tear down of the Virtual Research VR-4 Head Mounted Display, done by one of the engineers at VR sometime in 1994. He shows us how to remove the back light inverter and the main PCB. 'Scuse the vintage VHS EP mode recording. I...
Awesome VR Optics for 1″ Class Displays At Less Than Ten Dollars!
Professional wide field of view Virtual Reality optics for less than the price of a couple of double lattes! A while back I demonstrated a design for Leep On The Cheap, a proof of concept for wide field of view optics on 3" to 4" display panels. Trouble...
Dump Those Silly Colored 3D Glasses
They say you're not a true 3D enthusiast until you've got a shelf full of red/cyan and green/magenta anaglyph 3D glasses. I'm ready to dump mine in the waste bin, but there's this little problem; two more shelves of anaglyph DVD, BluRay and VHS movies...
Seeing the Eye in a New Light
There's been an enormous resurgence of DIY HMDs in the VR hacker community recently, some quite impressive. Understanding how the eye works is the key to these inventions. I found a really instructive 70 year old nugget which gives HMD...
The Joydick
At the risk of overstepping any and all boundaries of propriety, here are complete do-it-yourself build instructions for an "incredible" haptic feedback interface for your Atari console. With a bit of soldering and epoxy, you can add force...
Low Cost VR For The Virtual Hacker
From 1993: "Now you can go to Radio Shack, buy what you need, and build it yourself." Robert Suding and the Virtual Reality Special Report provide specific instructions for building a stereoscopic HMD for $435. Interestingly the optics and...
Mnemonic’s MRG2.2 Upgrade – Augmented Reality + Kinect
Several months ago I shipped off an MRG2.2 to Mnemonic in the Ukraine. He said he wanted to do a few mods and some experimenting. Little did I know that he would put together a totally sweet augmented reality system, where the view inside the...
It’s All In Between The Eyes
If you look yourself in the eyes, you'll start to realize that your eyes and your head are different than anyone else's. The spacing between your eyes, known as the interpupilary distance is about 65mm, but this varies from 50mm to about 75mm, depending on...
Teardown – Virtual Research V6
1995 brought us the V6 head mounted display from Virtual Research, the successor to the excellent design of the VR-4. The V6 doubled the overall resolution while retaining the great optics, field of view, comfort, and ease of use originally...
3D Photo Tools
If you've been into 3D still photos for a while, no doubt you've come to love StereoPhoto Maker, a great (free) Windows based tool for aligning, cropping, correcting and adjusting 3D digital pictures. But when you're done fooling with the...
Setup A Fastrak – Fast!
For many years, and perhaps still today, the Polhemus Fastrak was/is the reference standard for low lag, high accuracy six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking. Used extensively to track head mounted displays and data gloves, this magnetic...
How To Buy LCDs (in 1995)
Jeremy Oliver advises how to purchase LCD displays for your next homebrew VR helmet. (Hint: take all your optics to Montgomery Wards and try every TV and camcorder on the shelf!) Jeremy's less than successful experience with Radio Shack...
LEEP On The Cheap
Build your own LEEP style wide field of view head mounted display optics. Check out the instruction video and parts list below. In the late 80's and early 90's wide field of view head mounted displays were all the rage; immersion was...