Tuesday 19 August 2014

DIY Google Cardboard VR viewer

Like a hand-crafted Oculus Rift, but WAY crapper, here's a first attempt at creating Google Cardboard with, well, cardboard (and quite a lot of masking tape).



Bizarrely, it just works. Here's the slick casing.

And here is the original. Not too disimilar.












It started with an enjoyable dismantling of some knackered binoculars...


Some nice Bakelite, but mainly some useful lenses...


Like this baby. Lush...


To get started, the lenses were removed. Of course, they have a convenient fine screw thread and come in pairs. This makes them easy to mount on a small mount of cardboard. Cue scalpel...


They screw right in and also are thus adjustable...


Corrugated cardboard - it is a subtle structure and a beautiful invention. Now with added lenses.


To stop brain cross-talk in the brain because of signals from each eye seeing more than they should, a partition board was added (blinkers, basically)...


The target for the viewer is a normal (Android) phone with the Google Cardboard app running.



This was place in a box thus...


The viewer was added like this. Masking tape - you know it makes sense...


Eventually with a lot of sticking together haphazardly, it ended up looking like this:


With a slick insertion point for the phone:



The open sides are to compensate for a lack of controls. The real Google Cardboard has a very neat magnet and washer "system" to control the menus. In this version, touch screen is used, hence the hand-holes.



And that, more or less, is that. Easy peasy.

No comments:

Post a Comment