Making it Simple: Expanding Access and Lowering Barriers to Novel Interaction Devices for Virtual and Augmented Reality

The open source community has been an integral part in the rapid growth of the maker and DIY communities, mainly by facilitating easy exchange of information and ideas, thereby lowering the jump from ideation to a testable prototype. In this work, we add a new class of open-source tools and resources which, when used in conjunction with existing virtual reality or augmented reality systems, provide for an improved virtual experience. We focus on making our processes accessible and reproducible while keeping the costs of production of the devices as low as possible. Additionally, we describe three successful use-case projects that live in the interface between hardware and software, and we open-source the designs and software for easy reproduction by interested researchers. We hope that this paper will give AR/VR researchers the confidence in taking the next step of making virtual reality as realistic as possible and will hopefully snowball into a new class of devices/ecosystem.