Fly Virtually Using This Drone and Oculus Rift Combination

What's This?

By Adario Strange2014-04-29 03:34:31 UTC

Mashups of bleeding-edge technology are the lifeblood of innovation, and one team of experimenters may have outdone themselves by combining the Oculus Rift with a flying drone.

Using a DJI Phantom 2 and the hottest virtual-reality headgear on the market, a group from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology created a mechanism that gives wearers a real-time, first-person view from the drone's perspective.

The team mounted a pair of cameras to the drone, which allows wearers to look around in any direction, while it hovers in the sky. The drone is controlled by servomotors that move the cameras in the direction that wearers turn their head.

Oculus Rift and Drone

A camera-equipped drone connected to an Oculus Rift VR headset.

Video: YouTube, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The effect is a stereoscopic aerial view independent of the direction that the drone is facing.

A demonstration video of the dynamic, above, shows the combination in action. It seems to give wearers what might be the closest perspective to a truly "bird's-eye view" of independent flight that a human can have.

Oculus Rift and drone abstract

A diagram of the Oculus Rift camera control and camera mount.

Image: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Although the mechanism's developers offer diagrams that detail how the Oculus Rift-connected camera controls work, manning such a setup would likely take more than one person — that is, one to operate the drone and one to operate the cameras.

Called Oculus FPV, the experiment might not yield immediate applications, but it's easy to imagine the mechanism being used for search and rescue, surveillance and even as a virtual-tourism device.

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