Mirrorshades

Experimental apparatus for my PhD research, which explored allowing people to swap between viewing their real surroundings & a 3D virtual environment in real time.

The set up used a pair of webcams, decased & retrofitted with M12 lenses, mounted using 3D printed brackets to the front of the Oculus Rift DK1 virtual reality headset. This particular DK1 was from the very first batch of Oculus Rifts that was delivered to Europe back in 2013.

An early version of the Indoor Atlas magnetic indoor positioning system tracked the particpants as they walked through St Salvator's chapel in St Andrews, updating their position in a Unity based reconstruction of the chapel as it had been hundreds of years in the past. An Xbox game controller held in one hand allowed them to toggle the view displayed in the headset between the real world (as captured by the webcams) & the virtual reconstruction.

My full thesis is available from the University of St Andrews research repository.