I was looking at this DIY VR headset the other week - https://github.com/relativty/Relativ

It uses a gyro and arduino to create controller movements on your PC so that you can map the head movements to your games and display the screen in the headset. It's not a full VR experience but would be cool as a DIY project.


I've always been pretty keen to make a VR set up for Minecraft and have experimented with various smart phone hacks, but none have really been that good. This is mostly as I'm on a mac and so software choices are limited.

When I saw the Relativ DIY headset I thought that this is a much better solution. I already have a smart phone style headset I can hack up, plenty of spare arduinos and even a low res 5" screen I could experiment with. The only part I was missing was the gyro, so I ordered some from the net.

My plan is to use this setup on my sons Xbox, but I've not mapped out how to tap into the thumb-stick controls to hijack the view direction. That is until I just stumbled across ArduinoXinput - an Arduino library that allows you to communicate via USB with the Xbox controller. It basically allows you to use the I/O of arduino to trigger controller events. This means that I can create a new controller that uses the gyro for head movement but normal physical buttons for the rest of the controls.

So now that I have a solution I need to get cracking and actually make it.

https://github.com/dmadison/ArduinoXInput

https://github.com/relativty/Relativ