Democratic Video Pass-Through for Commercial Virtual Reality Devices

Abstract

Video pass-through Extended Reality (XR) is rapidly gaining interest from developers and researchers. However, video pass-through enabled XR devices' ecosystem is still bounded to expensive hardware. In this paper, we describe our custom hardware and software setup for providing effective video pass-through capabilities to inexpensive commercial Virtual Reality (VR) devices. The proposed hardware setup incorporates a low-cost HD stereo camera rigidly hooked to the VR device using a custom 3D printed attachment. Our software solution, implemented in Unity, overcomes hardware-specific limitations, such as cameras' delays, in a simple yet successful manner.