Turn an old smartphone into a VR headset
VIRTUAL-REALITY HEADSETS ARE ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS. Oculus can’t help but release a new one every five minutes, Sony has its own for the PS4, HTC has a bunch, and even Valve is getting involved. But if you’re willing to sacrifice graphical fidelity, responsiveness, convenience, and possibly your lunch, you don’t actually need any of them. All you need is an old-ish phone, a very cheap set of VR goggles to slot it into, a whole lot of patience, and some massively lowered expectations.
But, although this is a very much botched version of VR, it is, nonetheless, definitely VR. And not just the big-screen gaming kind, either—we’ll turn any old game with an accessible depth buffer into one with a proper stereoscopic 3D display; switch on the mouse sensor, and you can translate the phone’s accelerometer into mouse movement, giving us some degree of head tracking to boot. Our target while running through this will be GTAV, because strapping on a headset only enhances its ludicrousness, though you could conceivably try it with any game. While there’s no room-scale shenanigans, and you still need a controller to play, it’s far cheaper than a full headset, and really just a bit of fun.
1 MAKE THE LINK
First things first: Let’s sort out a link between your PC and your phone handset. For this we’ll use Trinus Cardboard VR and Trinus Server, the latter of which sits on your machine, while the former is an app downloadable on both Android and iOS phones. Note that there are a few different versions of Trinus; if you have a Daydream headset, you can take advantage of its extended capabilities by grabbing Trinus Daydream VR instead, and there’s also a server version for PSVR headsets—we’ll stick with the Cardboard version, as it’s the most universally usable.
>> Head to the Play Store [ Image A] or App Store and download Trinus Cardboard VR (Lite), the free time-limited version of the app. This will kick you out after 15 minutes, at which point you can reconnect again; as much as we’d encourage you to spend a little to get the full version, an enforced break after 15 minutes of low-resolution immersion probably isn’t the worst thing in the world. On your PC, download the companion app from
www.trinusvirtualreality.com and install it.
2 MAKE A CONNECTION
You have two options for connection: either Wi-Fi, which we’ll use here, or USB, which can offer lower latency, but comes with the obvious disadvantage that you’re tethered to your PC by a wire. When you’re using Wi-Fi, you definitely want your PC connected to a wired network connection to ensure the only potential source of network disruption is on your phone’s end. Fire up the Trinus app on the handset end, and you’re told your phone’s IP address; run the app on your PC, hit the triangular button on the phone to begin the connection, and you should find the PC app has detected the same IP. Set the capture mode to “General,” and the sensor mode to “None,” then hit the “Start” button on the PC end—you should see a portion of the Trinus server app streamed to your phone’s screen.
3 QUESTIONABLE QUALITY
You’ll likely notice that things don’t look so great [ Image B]. That’s basically by design—in order to get the best performance, Trinus lowers the default resolution to a painful 752x406, and defaults to a high performance mode, which adds extra compression. You can alter this on both ends: On the PC, change the image scale to ultra, and drag the compression slider all the way to the right, then open the “Settings” menu on the phone, and change the performance mode to “Quality.” Restart the server, and you’ll see the resolution get much more crisp—though when you move the phone, you may notice blurring. This can be disabled by heading to the “Video” tab on the PC and switching off “Motion Boost.” Bear in mind that everything we’ve just done you’ll probably want to switch off very soon, but it’s good to prove that it’s possible.
4
TIME TO PLAY
Shut off the server, and go ahead and fire up a game. Put it in windowed mode, head back to the Trinus server app, and set it to Game mode. Link up the server and your phone, bring your game back into focus, and you should see it beamed across—but you’ll notice a problem. It’s not stereoscopic [ Image C]. There’s an easy way to fix this: Kill the server, head over to the “Video” tab, and switch on “Fake3D.” This doubles the image for each eye, and it’s the least processor-intensive way of getting immersive gaming going, but it doesn’t do any stereoscopic depth processing, and it can’t have escaped your attention that it’s not scaled particularly well [ Image D]. Even activating the lens distortion mode on the phone (which requires the “Performance” setting to be on “quality”) doesn’t fix this—if this is the mode for you, you need to adjust the resolution of your game to as square an aspect ratio as it can possibly manage.
5
DO IT BETTER
OK, we’re here for proper 3D, and to get that, we need to use either Steam VR or, for the many games that don’t support it, ReShade. If you want to use the former, make sure Steam is shut down, head to the “SteamVR” tab on the Trinus server app, install its SteamVR driver, then relaunch Steam, load SteamVR, and your headset should be detected.
>> Much more interesting, though, is converting otherwise flat games to play in stereo 3D—this is a technique you can use with any old headset, so if you’re dying to force depth into your Oculus Rift on games like GTAV, you’re encouraged to follow along. Start by installing ReShade—grab the installer from http://
reshade.me, and point it at the game you want to install. Don’t worry about including any of the default shaders at this point, as they’ll just clutter things up. Instead, head to http://github.com/
BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D to download the Super Depth 3D shader pack, which includes everything you need. Point ReShade to its contents, then fire up your game.
6
GOING DEEP
Hit Home to open the ReShade overlay, and run through its tutorial screens. Switch on SuperDepth3D, and you should see your game switch to a stereoscopic view; this is derived from the game’s depth buffer, which means it doesn’t work with everything (and absolutely should never be used in multiplayer), but also means each eye is delivered a subtly different image—viewed together through Trinus in your headset, you should see depth. There are various settings you could tweak at this point; we found, testing in GTAV, that switching Auto Balance on made for a convincing depth effect, but it’s not flawless. First-person view in cars, and the phone popping up, mess with the depth map, and can temporarily ruin the effect.
>> Then layer on everything else. Polynomial Barrel Distortion [ Image E] squashes the view into a lens-happy rectangle, which means you won’t be dealing with a stretched peripheral-filling mess, and NFAA is all but essential if you don’t want to see too many jaggies. Oh, and a virtual nose can help with the nausea—switch it on, because you’ll probably need it.