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DIY VR: How to build your own headset, and why you probably won't want to
A primer on the joys and pains of building your own head-mounted display.
Virtual reality is in a bit of a weird place right now. After a lot of unfulfilled promise in the 1990s, it came back strong with the 2016 release of the Oculus Rift. For a while, it looked like VR, AR, XR, the metaverse, or whatever you wanted to call it, was going to be huge. Mark Zuckerberg was certainly convinced, and even Apple got in on the hype with its Vision Pro.
But by then momentum for alternate realities of every acronym was already in steady decline, and it only dwindled from there. The rate of development of new headsets has slowed, with many companies (including Apple) scaling back or shelving their efforts. While new releases like the Steam Frame and Pimax Dream Air are still happening, many of the most interesting developments in the space these days are on the enthusiast front.
That’s right, DIY VR is a thing, and with a couple hundred dollars in components, plus many hours of your time, you too can enter the immersive world of virtual reality while also experiencing the highs and lows of soldering, firmware flashing, and 3D printing. I rode that rollercoaster myself and learned why this is still a decidedly niche movement.
I stumbled into this space about a year ago. I primarily use VR for sim racing to practice driving the world’s greatest cars on the world’s greatest tracks while at home in my pajamas. At that time, I was using an HP Reverb G2, a virtual reality headset built around the Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) standard.
As part of its own cooling on VR tech, Microsoft was nixing support for WMR, and I feared that I might need a new headset. (I need not have worried. Many talented folks have kept WMR headsets alive through third-party drivers like OASIS on Steam.)
That’s when I found YouTuber CNCDan’s video on building a VR headset for $150. The price was certainly compelling, and as someone with a particular set of electronics skills developed over years of disassembling and repairing pinball machines, I thought it sounded kind of fun.
That opened the door to a rich landscape of DIY VR development, complete with software tools and hardware advice on how to get started.
The best starting place is Relativty VR. This project, started in the late 2010s by Jonas Ceccon, Gabriel Combe, and Maxime Coutté, includes all the code, configurations, and guidance you’ll need to get started.
But there are others, like OpenVR Arduino HMD, Project North Star, and the full-body tracking SlimeVR. There are plenty of ways to piece together your headset. As my first attempt, I kept it simple, sticking with the Relativty software and relying on the 3D headset models provided by CNCDan as part of his build. First step: the hardware.