Andrew Hazelden's mikromedia-based VR experiment: A pair of glasses built with a cardboard and a pair of mikromedia boards.
Virtual reality was a hot subject in the nineties before falling into obscurity for a while. In recent years it's making a comeback, especially since Facebook bought Oculus for 2 billion USD. Zuckerberg and his people weren't acting on nostalgia; they're betting on VR mainly due to advancements in graphic chips and high-resolution displays. That doesn't mean you can't experiment with it with microcontrollers.
Andrew Hazelden, the Libstock award winner, used Google's cardboard VR and inserted a pair of mikromedia for PIC32 boards instead of a smartphone.
Google's cardboard VR is just a tweak. The stereoscopic pairing of mikromedia boards is a Libstock project Andrew posted three years ago. He was just waiting for Google to catch up with him with the cheap solution for making VR glasses from cardboard.
a pair of mikromedia for PIC32 boards is not a replacement for a modern smartphone and its GPU. The project has a different purpose. Andrew explains:
My favorite part about this homebrew VR experiment in that the firmware can be programmed entirely in C code using VisualTFT and MikroC Pro for PIC32 so there is nothing keeping the developer away from the bare metal hardware and being free to hook up any sensor or accessory they can dream of.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika