A Smartphone-Based Head Mounted Display

In 2011, I worked on a prototype head mounted display using two smartphones as display panels for left and right eyes. It used LEEP lenses.

Description

Thin computing clients, such as smartphones and tablets, have experienced recent growth in display resolutions and graphics processing power. In 2011, we showed how to leverage these trends to create an experimental wide field of view, 3D stereoscopic head mounted display (HMD), based on two high resolution smartphones. This HMD prototype was unique in that the graphics system was entirely onboard, allowing it to be lightweight, wireless, and convenient to use.

Details

This was an experiment to see if we could use two smartphones to create a low cost head mounted display. It was submitted to and accepted by the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in 2011, held in Singapore.

Components

2 × iPhone 4

1 × Set LEEP lenses Taken from a Fakespace BOOM virtual reality display

1 × Custom mobile App App, written with the Unity Game Engine, and configured to provide either left of right eye view

1 × Custom Python App This app sent viewpoint coordinates and orientations to the instances of the mobile app, running on each iPhone, over wifi

1 × Masonite tray Holds two iPhones in place as well as the LEEP lens set.

Discussions

sophee24 wrote 01/26/2015 at 16:25

Any new news on this project?

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dkrum wrote 03/12/2014 at 16:56

After we published this poster, a guy named Palmer Luckey wrote about his interest in this project and our lab on MTBS3D. Long story short, he visited our lab, began working with us, and learned more about head mounted display design. He left to put together a Kickstarter and form the Oculus VR company.

We've worked on a number of other low cost displays which you can read about at diy.mxrlab.com. More details of this early dual smartphone project are in the poster abstract: http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/A%20Design%20for%20a%20Smartphone-Based%20Head%20Mounted%20Display.pdf (also in the project links).

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Samuel Wittman wrote 03/12/2014 at 16:48

From what I understand (from the images and descriptions), this is an Oculus Rift like device taking advantage of the high pixel density from smart phone screens? If so, that's awesome. I'd love to see more details of the project. What (if any) are your future plans for this display?

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A Smartphone-Based Head Mounted Display

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A Smartphone-Based Head Mounted Display

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