XR Display Research
During my time at the Institute for Creative Technologies, devices like the iPhone were released and various phone manufacturers began copying Apple's design. As a result, phone components like LCD screens and IMU sensors become much cheaper. Gone were the days of overpriced VR headsets with micro OLED displays, and IMUs or magnetic sensors that barely worked and caused nausea. After plateauing in the late 90s, suddenly, there was an opportunity for the field of VR to advance rapidly.
I worked in the MxR Lab on research led by Mark Bolas to leverage these low-cost components to build high-quality Head Mounted Displays. Alongside people like Thai Phan, Palmer Luckey, Evan Suma, and Logan Olson, we combined these components with cheap lenses, or repurposed higher quality lenses from old headsets, to create a variety of devices. Everything from the DIY Socket HMD (pictured above with a mount I designed and 3D printed), to cardboard 3D viewers that attached to phones and tablets (which Google later marketed as Google Cardboard), to Head Mounted Projectors which displayed AI characters on retro reflective screens. I remember when Palmer found a cheap low latency high fidelity IMU from China in a catalog. We were super excited to order it, after suffering through so many high latency and noisy sensors in commercially available VR headsets.
Soon after this the early Oculus Rift prototype Palmer crafted on his own, and showcased to John Carmack, was very similar to the stuff we were building in the lab. And from there, it was off to the races as VR enjoyed a remarkeable resurgence.
