AR You Going to Build This Headset?

Augmented reality (AR) is a cutting-edge technology that overlays digital information onto the real world, offering users an enhanced perception of their environment. Through blending virtual elements with the physical world, AR can transform mundane surroundings into captivating playgrounds where users can immerse themselves in fantastical adventures, interact with virtual characters, and unleash their creativity in entirely new ways. Whether one is exploring magical realms, battling virtual foes in their own living rooms, or collaborating with friends in shared AR experiences, the entertainment possibilities with AR are limitless and continuously evolving.

But AR is not all fun and games. There are numerous potential applications for the technology in healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and beyond. But despite these promising applications, AR has yet to achieve widespread commercial adoption. One major barrier to its mainstream success is the cost associated with developing and implementing AR solutions. High-quality AR experiences typically require sophisticated hardware, such as specialized headsets with advanced sensors and processing capabilities. However, these devices often come with hefty price tags, making them inaccessible to many consumers. As a result, the potential audience for AR applications remains limited, stifling demand and hindering the growth of the market.

Many members of the Hackster community would love to hack away at a pair of AR goggles, but do not want to pay for a commercial device, especially considering that such headsets are generally closed-source and difficult to experiment with. Instructables member Guenter1958 has demonstrated that a DIY headset might be the right path for these individuals to explore. For a few hundred dollars and a day’s work, one can build quite a nice device, and importantly, one that is infinitely hackable.

One of the best parts of Guenter1958’s build is that you may already have a number of the required parts in your spare parts bin. The headset is powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer with 4 GB of memory outfitted with a Pi 5 Active Cooler. A wide angle Camera Module 3 allows the system to sense the environment around it, and a 1440 x 2560 pixel 5.5 inch AMOLED display is used to overlay digital information on the real world. The googles from a virtual reality headset need to be scavenged to reflect the display’s image into the wearer’s field of vision. An inertial measurement unit is optional for head position tracking, and the rest of the parts are 3D-printed.

The tutorial walks through the build process step-by-step, and it looks fairly simple. No special skills are needed, and aside from a suitable 3D printer with a minimum 200 x 200 millimeter build area, one only needs a screwdriver to build the device.

An SD card image was made available to get the headset up and running quickly. It is loaded with a software stack including OpenCV (for detecting ArUco markers), MediaPipe (for hand gesture recognition), and the Unity real-time game engine for rendering graphics. A number of sample applications are available, including an AR version of Angry Birds, a Roll-a-Ball game, and a haunted house that can be explored.

Of course the pre-loaded software will only capture one’s interest for just so long, but no worries. Guenter1958 has included lots of details about the existing software stack and how to build custom software. With that information, and the user-friendly Raspberry Pi platform on which the device is built, it should be easy for hardware hackers to customize this system to do whatever they want it to do. Check out the project write-up if you would like to build your own copy of the headset.