Meant to be Seen

I've been hoping that this kind of functionality would be built into the rift. Bottom line, Palmer said 'no'. This functionality would be ideal for SO many reason allowing anything to be projected into the rift, not just VR content.

A hardware solution seems to be the only way to make this work. The output doesn't even need to be pretty, it just needs to be a screen floating in black space.

- You would need to plug the box into a computer to set IPD, screen size, curved vs flat, distance, etc but the settings could be saved into the hardware and moved somewhere else.
- It would need to provide a pass-through option that allows the rift to connect directly to the source for VR.
- for positional tracking it's going to need direct access to the camera.
- It would need to be able to manipulate sound as well, at least in stereo.

What would it take to make our own programmable box that adds this functionality? How feasible is this concept?

You can probably cobble this together yourself with a video capture card and some programming skills.

I agree with Cyber. There's two things I notice about your setup. In one scenario, you have a pc in the mix already, in which case, why not have the rift wholly attached to the pc and run/write a program like the VR cinema screenshot you have there that displays whatever input source you're going for with a capture card.

However, I think what you're also looking for is a box that can say, take an hdmi input from a ps4 and without a pc involved, display that in a screen on the rift. I think this is more interesting and is also totally doable, you just have to have something running whatever program is outputting to the rift and dealing with its headtracker. I'd look into some of the work geekmaster and others have done hacking in raspi's and other such solutions for a standalone rift projects.

Dr. Geekmaster, paging Dr. Geekmaster. Your VRbot skills are required here.