The Plan - Sensor Fusion Hardware

Apple guard their hardware closely, to build accessories for the iPhone you need to join the Made For iPhone (MFI) program. This helps keep the quality up to scratch but is a pain for the hobbyist! Enter the wonderful world of bluetooth low energy (Bluetooth 4.0 LE). The library needed to communicate with Bluetooth LE devices is part of the standard Apple SDK. No need to join the Apple MFI, this is my way in...
So the Plan is to develop a Bluetooth LE device that can plug into the Oculus rift and act as a bridge to send the data to the iPhone. Since the Rift is a HID USB device, I might as well make this bridge generic enough to support controllers as well. This will handle the data connection, the next thing I need is a power source. Lucky the Oculus is a relatively low powered device, this will allow me to use a simple USB battery power extender from ebay. If all goes well I should have a few hours of wireless rifting between charges. Stay tuned for more detail.  

Oculus Rift for the iPhone

I've had my Oculus Rift for a few days now, I must say I'm blown away. This is the next step in gaming for sure. This provides a problem for me, I am an iPhone developer by day and I have a strong belief in "The one device". That is, a device that can do everything, be my laptop, be my media player, be my TV.... you get the idea. The usage that now presents a problem is I want my "one device" to be my games console. So if the rift is the future, my one device has to support it. Here comes the bad news, my "one device" is my iPhone and the iPhone has zero support for the oculus rift. It seems Oculus VR are concentrating on desktop support so they are not going to add support for it anytime soon. Now by zero support I mean zero, the rift has a USB connection (requiring USB host) for the head tracking data, and an HDMI connection for the image, neither of which the iPhone supports. Now I could go out and buy an Android device which has both of these features, however as much as I've tried to use Android, its just not as good at my everyday tasks. So now I get to the point of this blog. I am going to add iPhone support to the Oculus Rift.