Back to the Future: Smartphones

[eshan]

I'm very excited for the Rift, but I feel like I'm in a holding pattern until it comes out. So in the meanwhile, I've decided to tinker with the distant(?) future VR platform: the smartphone. Let's say we take the current Rift demos and call that VR 1.0, while VR 2.0 and up could include position tracking, separate gun tracking, free walking, etc. It seems like we ought to already be able to get to 1.0 on a smartphone. Here are the 1.0 capabilities from the current Rift demos and how one could approach them on an Android smartphone:

Rift Display - Phone display plus lenses. FOV2GO? LEEP on the cheap?
Rift Tracker - Android 4.0 fuses accelerometer, gryo, and compass sensor data into orientation for you
XBox 360 controller - Pair with a PS3 controller over Bluetooth, for now keep aiming with your nose
Doom 3 support - Doom 3 is open source and at least partially ported to Android.

From here, you could theoretically modify the Doom 3 code to use the PS3 controller and orientation as inputs, and display output in side by side 3D. (If Doom 3 doesn't work out, older id games are already ported, or you could write a demo from scratch.) You also get the bonus of being able to do stand up, 360 turning VR. Does this sound doable? Can you get a decent FOV from a smartphone?

I appreciate any guidance, thanks!

[PalmerTech]

I was a lead on the FOV2GO project, check it out: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go/

You can get pretty great FOV out of the Galaxy Note viewer, about 60 degrees diagonally!

[cybereality]

What about VR.5? Anyone remember that show?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k[/youtube]