Head Mounted Display Setup

The primary goal of this class is to understand the fundamental building blocks of virtual reality by building a head-mounted display from scratch. We designed this HMD to be educational, accessible, reproducible, and low-cost.

Here are all the components we will use in this class and in the labs and you can find detailed information in the table below:

VRduino (rev 0.4c)

The EE267 uses custom hardware for position tracking. This shield for the Teensy provides the proper support circuitry for the photodiodes used with the HTC Vive Lighthouses. For the EE267 class, we provide hardware to students in the kits. If you would like to build your own VRduino tracker board, the manufacturing files are available here. We will update the manufacturing files as the hardware continues to develop.

We also wrote a plugin script for Unity that you can import in your Unity project to read data directly from the VRduino (or any Arduino) via a USB serial connection. You can download this script here.

Hardware Components Model Links Info Alternatives Comments
HMD Housing View-Master Deluxe VR Viewer Amazon Google Cardboard, Durovis Dive, etc. Nice and sturdy, can adjust focus.
Need to drill one of the cable holes open to route USB/HDMI cables into it.
Display Topfoison 6'' 1080p LCD Topfoison [Spec Sheet] Difficult to get at low cost with reasonably high resolution and driver board. Check Alibaba! Comes with HDMI driver board.
Get without audio jack due to poor mechanical design.
IMU InvenSense MPU-9250 Amazon [Datasheet] [Register Map] Lower-cost models with fewer DOF are available. Low cost, small-scale, high-quality 9DOF IMU with breakout board.
3DOF gyro, 3DOF accelerometer, 3DOF magnetometer.
Microcontroller Arduino Teensy 3.2 PJRC Other microcontrollers or FPGAs with more
than 8 configurable pin change interrupt vectors.
Small, low-cost, easy to use, great support, tons of libraries.
Cables 2x USB cables (for Arduino & LCD driver
board power) and HDMI-to-mini HDMI
Amazon Using the ultra-thin versions is nice if available. May need "high speed 4K" option for the HDMI cable.