pc vr gaming with phone

[Tedstonegenious]

I've done this with a app called Trinus VR, it was not the best of experiences, the app isn't free. But it does allow a 15 (I think) minute demo to see if it works with your hardware. The main problem are that:

 

1. Most phones, especially older ones, do not have enough bandwidth to carry a decent stream. It needs to be highly compressed to be able to carry it, wich heavily decreases quality, and more importantly, adds latency.

 

2.The display, no matter how high end, was not designed for VR. It was designed for you to look at is about 2 feet away directly. 

 

3.While most modern phones do have a complex array of sensors, it isn't the best for head tracking. Meaning you'll have to deal with head drifting and other issues. Although, that app i mentioned earlier does have an experimental mode where you can use some lights and the phones camera to act as a point of reference. 

 

4. This solution would not give you the custom controllers that are needed for many games (Half life Alex included) so you'll have to get though off of eBay or something. and controllers also need a external tracker to maintain their position relative to the player (you). This is either done through, a- external light houses or B) the headset you are trying to replace. The later is much more common with recent hardware. So unless you want to play a game that requires a normal controller anyways, you are going to still have to spend quite a bit of money.

 

Your best bet for a phone based solution would be a Gear VR, and a Samsung galaxy phone that is new enough to have a C port and speeds better than 2.0 you WILL need the extra bandwidth. (So S8 or later) because the headset was designed for the phone and its display, you'll have a much better time. And don't try using WiFi, the latency added will make all but those who have the highest tolerance to motion sickness tremble. 

[EnderCat]

Sooooo I'm kind of just experimenting with this and I don't have a phone with a gyroscope to actually test it, but, I have actually had an idea of how to do this. Of course RiftCat is how you can use your phone for your VR display (and of course this will not be nearly as good as the real VR headsets but it's amazingly cheap if you have the right phone) but what everyone's having trouble with is the hand tracking. Now again I haven't tested this but with Driver4VR you can use a kinect camera to control your body in VR. This translates your kinect camera's skeleton it made for you into controller movement so you can have full body tracking. But, what I was assuming (again I haven't tested so don't hate me too much) is that it could control your hands too. That would mean it would handle all the tracking other than the orientation, and you can use a normal controller to press the buttons after you point at it with your tracker.

There's also an option in rift cat where you can use another phone with gyroscope as a controller which may even fix the orientation issue mentioned eairlier. Now for this to be do able you'd have to have 3 working phones with gyroscopes in your house, which some people upgrade their phones a lot and keep their old versions just in case, or you may be lucky and find a crappy  phone with a gyroscope used online.