Affordable altered perspectives: Making augmented and virtual reality technology accessible

There is a lot of excitement about wearable computing, its applications, and its potential impact on the world. One ambitious prediction estimates that by the year 2018 the wearable computing market will be a multi-trillion dollar industry, with over 50 billion devices, more than half of which will be developed by companies that do not yet exist. One aspect of wearable computing involves the use of alternative interfaces, and the development of new virtual and augmented reality applications. Unfortunately, this is one of the most inaccessible technologies for all but the best-funded educational programs in the world, almost exclusively limited to the developed world. The reason for this lies in the expense of what is largely prototype display hardware, and the accompanying application development and experimentation tools. In this paper we describe our efforts to develop a low-cost platform that opens such application development to a much broader world, requiring the most minimal of hardware and computing infrastructure. We demonstrate how functionality that is typically limited to devices costing thousands of dollars, can be provided to students and educators with access to just a smartphone and under twenty dollars worth of materials.