Open Virtual RealityMark Bolas∗

USC Institute forCreative Technologies

USC School of Cinematic Arts

Perry Hoberman†

USC School ofCinematic Arts

Thai Phan‡

USC Institute forCreative Technologies

Palmer Luckey§

Oculus VR

James Iliff¶USC School ofCinematic Arts

Nate Burba‖USC School ofCinematic Arts

Ian McDowall∗∗Fakespace Labs

David M. Krum††

USC Institute forCreative Technologies

ABSTRACT

The ICT Mixed Reality Lab is leveraging an open source philoso-phy to influence and disrupt industry. Projects spun out of the lab’sefforts include the VR2GO smartphone based viewer, the inVersetablet based viewer, the Socket HMD reference design, the Ocu-lus Rift and the Project Holodeck gaming platforms, a repurposedFOV2GO design with Nokia Lumia phones for a 3D user interfacecourse at Columbia University, and the EventLab’s Socket basedHMD at the University of Barcelona. A subset of these will bedemonstrated. This open approach is providing low cost yet sur-prisingly compelling immersive experiences.

Index Terms: H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation(I.7)]: Multimedia Information Systems—Artificial, augmented,and virtual realities; B.4.2 [Input/Output and Data Communica-tions]: Input/Output Devices—Image display

1 INTRODUCTION

While early virtual reality systems required substantial technicaland financial resources to acquire, operate, and maintain, recentdevelopments in the consumer market space are upending the land-scape of immersive virtual reality. A variety of devices and systemshave introducted new levels of rendering, interaction, and trackingat low price points. This is due to Moore’s Law and to the adventof easily programmed game engines, commodity inertial sensors,and high performance graphics chips, among other trends in gam-ing and mobile devices. The Mixed Reality Lab at the University ofSouthern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies and otherorganizations have embarked on a number of projects that appropri-ate these off-the-shelf technologies and devices to deliver low costvirtual reality systems under open source.

At Virtual Reality 2012, we demonstrated a number of low costvirtual reality technologies including the FOV2GO viewer [1] andFAAST [11], a toolkit for Kinect based gesture control. We alsosupported a larger movement towards low cost virtual reality withour workshop on Off-the-Shelf Virtual Reality (OTSVR). We areagain conducting the OTSVR workshop at IEEE VR 2013, whichdovetails with this research demonstration.

Videos of the following demos can be found at:http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/ieee-vr-2013-mxr-lab-demo/

∗e-mail: bolas@ict.usc.edu†e-mail: hoberman@usc.edu‡e-mail: tphan@ict.usc.edu§e-mail: palmertech@gmail.com¶e-mail: iliff@usc.edu‖e-mail: nburba@usc.edu∗∗e-mail: ian@well.com††e-mail: krum@ict.usc.edu

Software, STL files, and additional open source information isavailable for these and other projects at:http://mxrlab.com

2 VR2GO AND INVERSE: MOBILE VIRTUAL REALITY

Figure 1: The VR2GO Smartphone Based Virtual Reality System.

At IEEE Virtual Reality 2012, we provided attendees of theOTSVR Workshop with FOV2GO kits to assemble around AndroidGalaxy Nexus or iPhone 4 smartphones. By distributing over 200of these DIY laser cut foam core kits and making software librariesand tutorials available online, we hoped to share our work with theresearch community and let that community develop their own ex-pressions of low cost immersive experiences. This year, at IEEEVR, we will demonstrate VR2GO, a new smartphone based viewer,with 3D printed plastic lens mounts and updated software (see Fig-ure 1). We will also demonstrate a tablet based virtual reality sys-tem called the inVerse, which provides users with a 2D interactionsurface in addition to a 3D stereoscopic view. Head tracked orienta-tion is provided through the accelerometers and gyros present in thetablets and smartphones. We are releasing these designs, includingSTL files and software, under an open source license in order toinfluence and disrupt industry trends.

3 SOCKET: LOW COST HEAD MOUNTED DISPLAY DESIGN

Figure 2: Socket: A Low Cost HMD Design.

With the commoditization of bright, high resolution LCD flatpanel for mobile devices, new designs for low cost head mounteddisplays (HMDs) have become possible. While smartphone and

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IEEE Virtual Reality 201316 - 20 March, Orlando, FL, USA978-1-4673-4796-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

tablet based immersive VR displays do serve a number of purposes,there is still a need for head mounted displays that can be driven bya more powerful computer. Also, by providing open source files,this design approach can be repurposed by academia and industryto target specific research and experiential goals. Towards this end,we have developed the Socket head mounted display (see Figure 2).This display incorporates a 1280x800 LCD flat panel and providesan approximately 90◦ field of view with inexpensive plastic lenses.We warp rendered images to correct for lens distortions in a mannersimilar to that used in the Fakespace Wide5 HMD. The Socket is anopen source reference design.

4 OCULUS RIFT AND PROJECT HOLODECK

Figure 3: Oculus Rift

The Rift is a Kickstarter effort by Oculus VR to create a VRheadset designed specfically for videogames in a lightweight com-fortable design (see Figure 3). Driven by the PC platform with anongoing effort to work with industry games, the Rift is developinga custom high frame rate inertial tracker.

Figure 4: Project Holodeck

Project Holodeck is a VR platform with a goal of creating anaccessible consumer gaming platform that engages the full bodyof the user while exploring new gaming concepts (see Figure 4).Project Holodeck uses a Playstation move for absolute head track-ing and a Razer Hydra for relative hand tracking. Project Holodeckis driven by a PC. Both the Rift and Project Holodeck prewarp im-agery to better match the magnification optics artifacts in a mannersimilar to the Fakespace Wide5 HMD.

5 THE ICT MIXED REALITY LAB

The ICT Mixed Reality Lab is part of the University of SouthernCalifornia (USC) and the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT).ICT is a University Affliated Research Center (UARC), founded in1999 by USC with a multi-year contract from the US Army. ICTbrings together academia and the creative talents of Hollywood toadvance digital media for learning, simulation, and training. Thegoal is to create synthetic experiences so compelling that partici-pants react as if they are real. The ICT Mixed Reality Lab devel-ops new techniques and technologies to advance immersive learn-ing and training.

The lab maintains a philosophy of understanding through build-ing and prototyping. To this end, the lab’s facilities include twomotion tracking and capture stages, and an optics/electronics work-room, and a workshop containing a CNC mill, laser cutter, and avariety of power tools. We also value a breadth of approaches andskills. The lab’s personnel have backgrounds in perception, elec-tronics, optical design, film production, mechanical engineering,and computer science. The lab has also hosted students for researchand internships from various universities and various programs, in-cluding human-computer interaction, computer science, and inter-active media.

Current areas of research in the ICT Mixed Reality Lab in-clude work on redirected walking [12, 9, 10], distance estimationin head mounted displays [5, 4], immersive presentation of vir-tual human characters [7], gestural interaction [11] and designs andcontributions to several innovative display projects. These includehead mounted projectors [6], the lightfield display [2, 3], varioussmartphone based virtual reality systems [1, 8], and the Wide5 andWideHD head mounted displays, which can provide an approxi-mately 150 degree field of view.

REFERENCES

[1] P. Hoberman, D. M. Krum, E. A. Suma, and M. Bolas. Immersivetraining games for smartphone-based head mounted displays. In IEEEVirtual Reality, pages 151–152, 2012.

[2] A. Jones, M. Lang, G. Fyffe, X. Yu, J. Busch, I. McDowall, M. Bolas,and P. Debevec. Achieving eye contact in a one-to-many 3d videoteleconferencing system. ACM Trans. Graph., 28(3):64:1–64:8, July2009.

[3] A. Jones, I. McDowall, H. Yamada, M. Bolas, and P. Debevec. Ren-dering for an interactive 360◦ light field display. ACM Trans. Graph.,26(3), July 2007.

[4] J. A. Jones, E. A. Suma, D. M. Krum, and M. Bolas. Comparabilityof narrow and wide field-of-view head-mounted displays for medium-field distance judgments. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium onApplied Perception, SAP ’12, pages 119–119, New York, NY, USA,2012. ACM.

[5] J. A. Jones, J. E. Swan II, G. Singh, S. Reddy, K. Moser, C. Hua,and S. R. Ellis. Improvements in visually directed walking in virtualenvironments cannot be explained by changes in gait alone. In ACMSymposium in Applied Perception (SAP), pages 11–16, Los Angeles,CA, Aug. 2012.

[6] D. Krum, E. A. Suma, and M. Bolas. Augmented reality using per-sonal projection and retroreflection. Personal and Ubiquitous Com-puting, 16(1):17–26, 2011.

[7] D. M. Krum, E. Suma, and M. Bolas. Spatial misregistration of virtualhuman audio: Implications of precedence effect. In The 12th Interna-tional Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), Santa Cruz, CA,Sept. 2012.

[8] J. L. Olson, D. Krum, E. A. Suma, and M. Bolas. A design for asmartphone-based head mounted display. In IEEE Virtual Reality,pages 233–234, 2011.

[9] E. A. Suma, G. Bruder, F. Steinicke, D. M. Krum, and M. Bolas. Ataxonomy for deploying redirection techniques in immersive virtualenvironments. In IEEE Virtual Reality, pages 43–46, 2012.

[10] E. A. Suma, S. Clark, S. Finkelstein, Z. Wartell, D. Krum, and M. Bo-las. Leveraging change blindness for redirection in virtual environ-ments. In IEEE Virtual Reality, pages 159–166, 2011. (19

[11] E. A. Suma, B. Lange, A. Rizzo, D. Krum, and M. Bolas. FAAST:the flexible action and articulated skeleton toolkit. In IEEE VirtualReality, pages 247–248, 2011.

[12] E. A. Suma, Z. Lipps, S. Finkelstein, D. M. Krum, and M. Bolas. Im-possible Spaces: Maximizing natural walking in virtual environmentswith self-overlapping architecture. In IEEE Transactions on Visual-ization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Virtual Reality), pages555–564, 2012.

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